Getting Compensation For Victims Of Traumatic Brain Injuries In Minot, North Dakota
If you suffered a traumatic brain injury as a result of someone’s negligence, it is likely that you will need compensation to help pay for your medical bills, lost income, and mounting additional costs. A Minot personal injury attorney can help.
What Is Traumatic Brain Injury?
A traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a serious and debilitating injury that results from a trauma or blow to the head. Brain injuries can occur because of car accidents, motorcycle accidents, truck accidents, slip and falls, and all kinds of other negligent incidents. Head and brain injuries can cause victims serious suffering, life-long complications, and a severe amount of stress.
TBIs are a complicated area of law since the injuries most often do not have a visible element. One cannot simply show a jury their brain injury. Because of this, insurance companies and defense attorneys in general, often downplay TBI injuries.
Though it is true that a brain injury can range in severity, like any other injury, even mild brain injuries should be taken seriously since any injury to the brain can create serious complications to one’s physical, cognitive, and emotional abilities. Quite simply, the brain is critical to human function.
Brain Injury Symptoms
Every year, there are nearly 3 million brain injury related visits to the ER, hospitalizations, and deaths in the United States. These injuries cause a wide variety of symptoms that affect people in every way imaginable. Symptoms for brain injuries can vary based on how your brain injury occurred and the severity of the injury.
In mild traumatic brain injuries (or mTBI), patients often experience loss of consciousness after the injury, the feeling of being dazed or confused, headache, nausea and vomiting, fatigue, speech problems, difficulty sleeping, and loss of balance. Mild brain injuries can also cause blurred vision, ringing ears, or changes in your ability to smell and taste. You may also be sensitive to lights and sounds at this time. It’s also possible to have memory or concentration problems, mood swings, and depression and anxiety along with your brain injury. Although an mTBI often does not have lifelong consequences that we know of, they still create a serious problem for those suffering from them while the symptoms last.
Severe brain injuries carry all the symptoms from a mild TBI and more. A severe brain injury can cause loss of consciousness for minutes to hours, persistent and severe headaches that vary in intensity, convulsions or seizures, and coma. Moderate to severe TBIs can also cause lasting damage to the brain that can create a near unlimited list of permanent consequences that can severely affects one’s quality of life.
Common Causes Of Brain Trauma
There are 1.7 million diagnosed cases of traumatic brain injury that occur in the United States each year. On top of that, 5.3 million people live with a disability caused by TBI in the US alone. Every year there are about 235,000 hospitalizations for TBI, and about 80,000 to 90,000 people each year that experience the onset of long-term disabilities from TBI. Clearly, there are lots of brain injuries happening every day in the United States, but what exactly is causing them?
According to the Mayo Clinic, the most common causes for brain injuries are falls, motor vehicle collisions, violence, and sports injuries. Of course, not all of these are a result of negligence–but the top two, falls and vehicle collisions, often are.
Slips and Falls
Falls of some type make up 48% of all traumatic brain injury emergency room visits each year in the US. These brain injuries from falls disproportionately affect children and older adults. In fact, 4 out of 5 brain injury hospital visits in older adults were caused by falls.
Clearly, a TBI is one of the most dangerous outcomes that can occur after a slip and fall. This is especially true for slips that take place on hard surfaces where one may fall down and hit their head on the ground. These cases can vary in severity depending on the impact to the head.
Slip and fall accidents can happen anywhere and to anyone. They commonly occur at work places, on construction sites, in parking lots or garages, or in public places like the post office or grocery store. In these cases, you may be able to sue for compensation for your damages. If you believe that your fall-related TBI was the fault of someone else, you may be entitled to compensation.
Motor Vehicle Accidents
Motor vehicle accidents–like car accidents, truck accidents, and motorcycle accidents–cause many different types of injuries, including traumatic brain injuries. Since the second leading cause of TBIs are motor vehicle accidents, it is clear that they are a common result of collisions. When a victim of a motor vehicle collision suffers a blow to the head during impact, they can have lasting consequences far beyond a broken bone or laceration. If you’re not wearing a seatbelt, or if the force from the collision is particularly intense, you could easily suffer the consequences from a traumatic brain injury for months, years, or forever.
Complications Following Brain Trauma
Brain injuries often result in all types of complications. These complcatication could range from lifelong headaches to a coma or vegetative state. With a TBI, it is also possible to suffer something called brain death. Brain death occurs when there’s no measurable activity taking place in the brain and is most often life-ending. These complications, from mild to severe, are what makes suffering a brain injury so complicated and stressful. Unlike a more straightforward injury, like a broken bone, there is not clear treatment, prognosis, or healing time. These unknown factors often mean that attorneys and injured victims need to work close together to ensure that all damages, and potential future damages, are being taken into account while going through the personal injury claim process.
Contact An Experienced Minot Brain Injury Attorney
If you or someone you love has suffered a brain injury from a motor vehicle accident, slip and fall, or any other negligent incident, you may be entitled to receive compensation for your damages. Our lawyers here at Sand Law are ready to take on your case and are eager to help you get the compensation that you deserve. For more information or to schedule a free consultation, please contact us online or at 701-394-5396.