North Carolina Car Accident Lawyer Blog

How does someone acquire a North Carolina brain injury? Simple question, right? Indeed, the answer is not so simple – and your inability to see the nuances could be hugely problematic.

The scientific research on traumatic brain injury is in its relative infancy. But researchers have confirmed that a variety of events and accidents cause most brain injuries. These include sports accidents, automobile crashes, fights, wound sustained in battle or in fights, slip and falls, drug or surgery related side effects or complications, etcetera.

If you just look at standard information on brain injuries, you might come away thinking something along the lines of the following: “as long as I protect my head, I won’t get a brain injury.” In general, that’s correct. But you can still suffer a serious brain injury, even if your head is left completely untouched or unscathed.

How is that possible?

Short answer: your brain is connected to the rest of your body. The body is an integrated machine. If you suffer a severe body blow – during a car accident or a sporting event, for instance – your body gets shaken up, and your brain does, as well. Body blows can lead to brain injuries, such as diffuse axonal injuries, in which the brain essentially get sloshed around in your skull. Damage can occur at the location of impact as well as at the location of the secondary impact – usually opposite the main impact.

Moreover, a body blow created head injury may be difficult to detect, even using the best diagnostics. If you are a football player, for instance, and you suffer bruising battles, day in and day out, you might experience sub concussive events that do real and chronic damage to your brain – potentially even changing your neurochemistry for the worse and altering your brain structures. But you will have no way of knowing that, and you might not even become aware of the potential traumatic brain injury for years or decades.

This article is not meant to scare you into never playing sports or never engaging in any rough play or anything like that. But it’s designed, however, to help you think more broadly and integratedly about the causes and consequences of brain injuries. When we think about these events, we tend to think about acute, “explosive” type of events – a knife wound to the brain, or a horrific looking collision on the gridiron, for instance. But many people almost certainly develop brain injuries slowly, over time due to repetitive, concussive blows to the head or body.

If you believe that you have been injured – or that someone you love has been hurt – due to a body blow or series of body blows, the team here at DeMayo Law can help you deal with your traumatic brain injury case. Connect with us now for a free consultation, and let us help you make sense of what you might be able to do to obtain a recovery and deal with the multiple problems that have arisen in your life as a result of the event.

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Body blows can cause brain injuries

Sub concussive events.

Decades ago, individuals who suffered from brain injury in North Carolina were told that loss of certain brain functions would be more or less permanent. Unlike muscle cells, bone cells, skin cells, and other tissues, which can regrow and rejuvenate, brain cells were thought to be somehow different. If you suffer neuronal damage, that damage is forever – or at least so researchers used to believe that. But over the past decade and a half or so, brain scientists have discovered an amazing and astounding diversity of ways in which the brain can either regrow certain tissues or/and restore certain functions.

This new and emerging research confirms two things:

1. The brain and its structures are far more plastic and malleable than researchers used to believe.

2. The brain is vastly more complicated than researchers used to believe.

Of course, to take advantage of the brain’s compensatory mechanisms is easier said than done!

The brain kind of does what it wants to do. And scientists are only beginning to learn how to manipulate the processes of brain function and restoration. In some cases, for instance, North Carolina brain injury victims may be able to compensate for injury-related memory problems by using alternative learning techniques — using healthy parts of the brain to compensate for some deficit. For instance, some injured victims have been able to use a spatial visualization mnemonic scheme to remember things like their phone numbers, social security numbers, etc.

To discover the best ways to manipulate the brain’s plasticity to your advantage, you need excellent rehabilitation specialists. You also need a relatively open mind to examine potentially successful strategies. The literature on brain plasticity is large and growing. It may behoove you and your physician and your family to explore it, so you can make betterdecisions about your therapy and potentially solve difficult problems.

Connect with DeMayo Law to get a free consultation.

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The science of brain plasticity

How brain injury victims can learn to remember again

Whether you suffered a traumatic brain injury in North Carolina due to a horrific auto accident, gridiron collision, or surgery-related complication, you want to heal as quickly as possible. This is understandable. But in your rush to “fix yourself,” you could get sucked into a particularly subtle and possibly damaging problem. Specifically, you could become enraptured by other people’s success stories and then try to hold yourself (or your spouse or child or other relative – the person who has the brain injury) to that high standard of recovery.

What’s wrong with reading about miracles?

Nothing, at least on the surface.

But comparing yourself to others – particularly when other people have succeeded and you’ve not yet succeeded – can be a dangerous business. For instance, imagine comparing your own resume to 12 year old Mozart’s resume. If you sat there and dwelled upon differences between what Mozart achieved at that young age and what you’ve achieved thus far in your life, you would probably get pretty depressed! Likewise, imagine comparing your body right now to the body of a gorgeous model. You might be pretty attractive, but if you compare your own flaws to the flawless body of a professional model, your self-esteem will likely plummet a bit.

Likewise, if you compare your North Carolina brain injury recovery with someone else’s “miracle recovery,” you may find yourself disappointed with your progress, even if you are getting better and recovering more functions than your doctor thought you would recover.

It’s good to have role models – but compare yourself to yourself, not to other people.

It’s obviously good and inspiring and potentially useful to read about stories of brain injury recovery. You need that inspiration to get through things. It’s useful for struggling business people to study successful business people; and it’s useful for people who can’t find dates to study the tactics and strategies of people who get dates all the time. So too, it can be useful for you to study others who’ve succeeded with brain injury therapies and so forth.

All that said, you want to play a game you can win. One way to do that is to strive for improvement over yourself in the past. In other words, if you are trying to recover, can you perform better, remember more, or even just feel better about your life than you did/felt a month ago, six months ago, a year ago?

By creating benchmarks for yourself and setting goals, you can inject much needed purpose and play a game you can win – and build towards improvement and more happiness.

The team at the Law Offices of Michael DeMayo can help you with your journey.

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How to compete with yourself

Dangers of comparing yourselves with others

How many military personnel in the Afghanistan and Iraq theaters, prior to 2010, suffered brain injuries? U.S. Representative Bill Pascrell of New Jersey wants to know.

Pascrell serves as the chair of the Congressional task force on brain injuries. He recently pressed Leon Panetta, the Defense Secretary, to provide more information about traumatic brain injury (TBIs) among U.S. troops prior to 2010. Over the past two years, the military has kept greater track of combat related brain injuries. Thanks to better diagnostics and testing as well as better general awareness, we’re beginning to discover the (huge) extent of the problem. One Pentagon study found that up to 16 troops a day (on average) suffered some form of TBI – most often a concussion related event.

Military related brain injuries have a way of creating problems for entire families – and potentially even hampering U.S. military effectiveness. But getting and sharing relevant data can be challenging, even for organizations as flush and sophisticated as the military. This lack of data speaks to a larger problem when it comes to brain injury diagnosis, treatment, and symptom checking. Although diagnosticians lump traumatic brain injuries together as TBI – in reality, the diversity of ways in which the brain can be injured is probably mind boggling.

There are probably thousands upon thousands of different variations of common brain injuries. And while our imaging technologies and another diagnostic tools are getting better, they are still very raw and very rudimentary. To give you an idea: in order to diagnose brain injury called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) – a condition that often afflicts boxers, football players, and other people who participate in high contact sports – you actually need to thin slice the brain. Not something you want to do to someone who is still alive!

The general point is that our knowledge of North Carolina brain injuries is much like a sea captain’s knowledge of an iceberg – we just see the tip of what’s out there.

To navigate in this kind of world, you might find it helpful to connect with a North Carolina brain injury law firm. The team here at DeMayo Law would be happy to provide a free consultation. Michael A DeMayo’s team is one of the most resource-rich and respected in the state.

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Pentagon is asked to Account for Brain Injuries Before 2010

Congressional Task Force on Brain Injury

University of Illinois researchers have developed some startling insights into the nature and locus of intelligence in the brain — insights that could powerfully help North Carolina brain injury victims.

Researchers studied 182 brain injured Vietnam veterans who had focal brain damage related to penetration wounds. Aaron Barbey, a University of Illinois professor who helped lead the research team, said the study may help researchers understand how different brain structures work together to create skills like executive function or even general intelligence.

The game here is essentially the art of learning by subtraction. When you can find a patient who has a very specific, isolated type of brain damage, you can then measure that person’s lost skills and other changes. From those observations, you can deduce what role that specific region probably played. For instance, if you get injured specifically in the left temporal cortex — and then you lose the ability to connect names and faces — then you can make a hypothesis that that region is responsible for whatever intelligence is needed to connect names and faces.

It’s not an exact science. You can’t precisely discover cause and effect relationships this way. But you can certainly find powerful associations and generate hypotheses. Ideally, these hypotheses can then be used to help guide other research and even help generate more specific therapies for different kinds of North Carolina brain injury victims.

Unfortunately, in many cases, the brain injury is not localized… rather, it’s generalized and diffuse. Many different structures might be damaged. Understanding and isolating how and when and where the damage has occurred can be very, very difficult, even with the most sensitive techniques. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t try to use these techniques. But we also should recognize that the universe of brain injuries is hugely diverse. We need to be careful not to extrapolate too much based on one study or even one seemingly successful set of hypotheses.

For help dealing with a specific issue, connect today with DeMayo Law, a North Carolina brain injury law firm.

More Web Resources:

University of Illinois study on brain injured Vietnam vets.

Focal brain damage

Whether you’ve developed a North Carolina brain injury over time, after suffering multiple concussions while playing a contact sport; or a major truck accident jolted you, you have been left with residual health problems. You are relentlessly focused on getting better, regaining function, and bringing your life back into balance. And that’s terrific. The first step towards recovering from serious setbacks in life — be they emotional, financial, or physical — is the proper attitude.

On the other hand, many brain injury victims and family members of victims can get so wrapped up in the “improvement game” — the neverending quest to get better and restore functions — and get sucked into believing that the quest is an all or nothing campaign. Instead, it may be more resourceful for you and your family to think about your brain injury recovery in a different way.

Ad Hoc Approach Versus “Get It All Done at Once”

You are in the thick of it. You are fighting to regain control of your life, regain some level of function, and improve your lot. So what do you think makes more sense: trying to fix every single problem in your life that’s been created by your brain injury in one fell swoop? Or strategically picking one or two major issues and then brainstorming workarounds for them?

Obviously, the smarter answer is number two – to find strategic workarounds. But how often do you do this?

Odds are, you spend far more time looking to do the equivalent of a “hitting a home run” than you do looking for a “strategic single.”

How to Brainstorm Strategic Solutions to a Brain Injury Related Problem

1.    Get very, very, very clear on the outcome you have in mind.

For instance, maybe your brain injury has made it very difficult for you to drive. So you need to find some way to get to work. You would like to fix every other problem with your vision and balance and coordination. But the main problem at hand is “how do I get to work?” So solve this first!

Do you see how getting so specific already changes the nature of your quest? Instead of searching for new glasses or ocular therapy or what have you, now you will be automatically looking for potential solutions like “find someone to carpool with” or “work out a deal with my boss so I can work from home.”

2.    Once you get clear on your outcome, spend a significant amount of time brainstorming solutions.

Don’t just stop with 10 or 20 ideas. Go deeper. If you are too tired to think about solutions, bring in a friend or a family member who understands your needs and have that person help. The best brainstorming involves going far beyond what your conscious mind understands and into the subconscious domain. You need to go for quantity here – don’t try to edit it yourself, at least during the initial stages.

3.    Once you have a bunch possible solutions, analyze, strategize, pick a plan, and put it into action.

Once you have a very clear outcome and 50 or 100 different ideas for how to get there, you probably will find the analysis-action-implementation part pretty intuitive. Just be sure to separate these tasks. You don’t want to ask your creative brain to be analytical, and you shouldn’t ask your analytical brain to be creative.

Dealing with a North Carolina brain injury can be extremely confusing. Connect with the resources at the Law Offices of Michael DeMayo today to understand your rights and make progress towards your goals.

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How to get very, very clear regarding an outcome

The art of brainstorming

The title of this blog post is purposely heretical – how could maintaining hope that your North Carolina brain injury might heal ever be a “bad” thing?

After all that you and your family have been through since the event that caused your injury – be it a sports-related concussion, a car accident, a fight with somebody, or even a drug related complication, like a medication-induced stroke – you desperately NEED hope. You need good news to renew your spirit and can keep you fighting onwards.

Obviously, that “hope springs eternal” feeling should be cultivated and nurtured.

Studies have even shown that patients who maintain a sense of optimism and equanimity during difficult times (e.g. after a scary diagnoses) can actually achieve better long-term results and – in some cases, pretty miraculous ones. The title of this blog post wasn’t talking about the NEED for hope, in other words, being a potential problem. Yes — you need to be hopeful and find resources, like a qualified North Carolina brain injury law firm and a highly skilled physician and medical team.

But you also need to operate in reality! To see your situation as it really is.

It sounds paradoxical at first: you need to be able to hope and believe in miracles – but you also need to ground yourself in reality: the reality of the science, and the reality of your diagnosis.

Why? Because otherwise, you will almost inevitably be disappointed by the positive results you do get because they will not meet your idealized expectations.

It’s a Tricky Game: Here’s How to Play It.

Consider the case of a young man who gets a severe brain injury playing a high school football game. After several days in coma, he emerges. But he can barely talk. And he has lost a significant amount of cognitive function and emotional control.

If you are his parents or concerned relative, obviously the news is devastating. You need to be able to lean on feelings of hope to get through the situation and to find solutions. On the other hand, you could easily find yourself getting lost in fantasies: decades from now, maybe a doctor might develop a miracle drug based on nano robots that will totally repair his brain. If you live in fantasyland, you will be disappointed (as opposed to be elated) when your son manages to walk again and respond to basic commands.

After all, that level of progress – while potentially great or even miraculous – will not take you anywhere near to your fully idealized vision of the far future, in which your son is back to normal.

The moral here is that, as a victim or family member of victim of a brain injury, you need to navigate two seemingly contradictory positions. You need to be able to see reality as it really is – and not get fooled by your own delusions or the delusions of others. On the other hand, you need to maintain hope for miracles, even within that context.

As we said, it’s a tricky business, but it’s an important issue to talk about.

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The importance of seeing reality clearly

The importance of hope

Perhaps your son, a strapping high school senior, suffered a massive concussion during a homecoming game, and now you’re trying to get a clear diagnosis for his North Carolina traumatic brain injury. Or maybe your husband suffered a blood clot during a routine surgery that flowed to his brain and caused a stroke. Or maybe some idiot driver on a cell phone hit you at a stop light, giving you whiplash and a minor concussion.

No matter how you got here, you face a crisis. You (or someone you love) must deal with and recover from a traumatic brain injury. A North Carolina brain injury law firm can certainly help you and your family come to grips with the critical steps you need to take to protect your rights to get compensation and fair treatment through the justice system. But you need more help than just your lawyer and/or doctor can give you.

Here’s one pitfall you may face: “locking on” to an early TBI diagnosis.

There is one thing that’s certain about traumatic brain injury diagnosis: nothing is really certain.

The brain is such vast, unexplored terrain. Medical science barely understands how even healthy brains function. And traumatic brain injuries have a disturbing way of evolving and changing months and even years down the line. Thus, your prognosis may be fluid. One day, you may wake up feeling pretty good and “cognitively restored.” Two weeks later, you might feel mentally cloudy and irritable for reasons that might (or might not?) pertain to your head injury. Months after that, you might feel better again. Then years later, you might develop early signs of Alzheimer’s or other cognitive deterioration. Back and forth it goes, back and forth. This diagnostic chaos is not necessarily the fault of your medical providers. It’s just difficult for people to understand what’s really going on in head injured victims.

As we’ve discussed before on this blog, the diagnostic uncertainty creates a kind of permanent stress hanging over the injured victim’s life. It also can lead to a kind of tendency to want to “lock in” a diagnosis without your doctor’s assent… just to reduce the uncertainty in your life.

This tendency, while understandable, can be problematic for two reasons:

1) You may “lock in” a diagnosis too early — when the situation is too fluid to make the call. For instance, you may decide that your brain injury is “limited” to slight memory loss and coordination problems. As a result, you might miss signs that the brain injury has evolved and caused irritation and depression and weight gain. Because you “locked in” to the first diagnosis, you may mistakenly see your irritation/weight gain/what have you as just signs that you need to “toughen up”… as opposed to signs that you need to see a doctor ASAP.

2) If you overly box yourself in with a self-imposed diagnosis, you might make it more difficult to heal due to a kind of a negative placebo effect. For instance, say you believe that your memory is “gone.” It’s possible that, due to the placebo effect or something like it, you may actually lose some memory capacity.

It’s tricky business. The better the help you can get, the easier your journey will be. A North Carolina brain injury law firm can help you unpack your legal options and help hold a defendant to justice.

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It’s tricky to diagnose a traumatic brain injury

How traumatic brain injuries evolve over time

Going back to work after an illness is never easy, but this process can be particularly fraught if you’re recovering from a traumatic brain injury in North Carolina. Whether you’re recovering from a truck accident, botched surgery, stroke, or medication side effect debacle, you are still probably pretty scared about your medical condition, and you want to plan a safe return to work.

On the other hand, you don’t want to be treated like a pariah – or treated overly delicately. If you love what you do – and/or you need the money – you want to get back to being a functional employee (or owner) sooner than later.

Here are some tips for how to make you return to work relatively stress free and simple:

•    Before going back to the office, spend some time journaling and thinking about how you’d like the experience to happen. What fears do you have about the experience? What would you like to prevent happening? What would you like to achieve back at work? The more deeply you understand what you want out of the experience — and the more you think about it beforehand productively — the easier your situation will be.

•    Make your needs known. If you don’t have the ability to concentrate like you once did — or if you simply can’t manage the projects and traveling you did prior to your accident — don’t bottle that information up! You might be surprised at how accommodating your workplace can be.

•    If you do have an ongoing disability, you’re afforded significant rights per North Carolina law. If your employer – or an employee for your firm – violates those rights, the company can be held to legal account.

•    If you find your job is just too difficult to do, don’t panic. Instead, get creative and resourceful. Given your newly found obstacles and limitations, what can you do? What would you like to do? If you used to work in a managerial role, can you take a different job in a different capacity in your company? What could you outsource that’s giving you trouble? For instance, say you used to spend a lot of time computing statistical information for your firm, and now you can’t do that work effectively without getting a headache. Could you find an assistant or someone else at your company to help you with that, so you can focus on the jobs that you can still do?

•    In general, focus your mental attention on what might be possible or what is possible as opposed to what’s “gone wrong.” You obviously don’t want to be a Pollyanna, but as the old saying goes, “you can’t do a don’t.”

•    Get the right kind of help. Recovering from a brain injury is no easy task, even if you “only” suffered a mild concussion. A good physician, high quality North Carolina traumatic brain injury law firm and sympathetic colleagues, friends, and family members can all help you meet your challenges as you try to restore normalcy in your life and get back into the routine of work and play.

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Focus effectively

Focus on the positives

The issue of North Carolina sports related brain injuries is a real and scary one – for youth athletes and their parents as well as for college players and pros. You may have read moving and sobering stories on this blog and other sources about NFL athletes and hockey professionals who suffered damage on the field (or rink) that led to death, dementia, or other problems.

Nationwide Children’s Hospital conducted a study in 2011 that found that nearly 9,000 kids between the ages of 6 and 17 go to the ER for concussions every year. This “9,000 brain injury victims a year” figure may actually vastly under estimate the problem, since most experts believe that the bulk of sports related concussions go unreported and untreated.

So what can be done?

The answer is obviously complicated, but better helmet technology can certainly play a role.

The sports company Riddell currently sponsors the National Football League’s helmets. But competitors like Schutt Sports, Thermopraxis, Xenith, Rawlings are all working on various helmet technologies to protect athletes from “having their bells rung” after falls or hits or other on the field interactions. These helmets use a dazzling array of technologies, which range from foam padding to air filled pads to bladders capable of blasting the head with cooling gas to prevent brain swelling after a hard hit.

Some helmet manufacturers are experimenting with designs that depart from the “single piece” helmet model. The basic idea is to diffuse the force to the head. The concept borrows from geophysics:

Tectonic plates on the earth’s crust can transmit energy from earthquakes pretty easily, if the plates are solid and intact. This is why earthquakes on the East Coast tend to be felt for dozens or hundreds of miles around: because the material underneath is solid and not crumbly, the ground can transmit vibrations pretty easily. On the West Coast, however, near the San Andreas Fault in California, the crust is crumbly. It thus does not transmit vibrations as well. So an earthquake in San Francisco or Los Angeles won’t travel as far, because the crust underneath is broken up into so many different pieces.

The same basic concept might help engineers make helmets that can diffuse impacts better!

In any event, it’s all well and good that manufacturers are developing new and better helmet technologies. But if you’re an athlete who suffered a concussion while playing a sport, you may want to speak with a North Carolina traumatic brain injury law firm about to do to collect compensation and protect your rights.

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Football turns to helmet technology to tackle head injuries.

New helmet technologies.