You may suffer a traumatic brain injury at work, but that doesn’t mean that the impact to your life is going to be exclusively contained to your workplace. A TBI can actually affect all sorts of areas in your life and may change your entire future. It’s important to understand how this can happen and what you can do about it.
It’s also critical to understand that every traumatic brain injury can be a little different. It’s difficult to predict exactly how yours will manifest or what symptoms you will see, but you can get a general sense of how these changes may occur. Here are three big things to consider:
Can you return to work?
One thing to consider is that you may not be able to return to your career. For instance, memory issues are one of the main symptoms of serious traumatic brain injuries. If it becomes difficult for you to remember important things on the job, are you still going to be able to do that job well enough?
Will it impact your family life?
Symptoms can also include serious personality changes, irritability, mood swings and things of this nature. All of these can change how you relate to the people around you. If they feel like you are an entirely different person after your brain injury, could that lead to divorce or the breakdown of other personal relationships?
What can you do moving forward?
The most important thing, of course, is to look into all of the medical options that you have to seek as complete of a level of healing s possible. This can take a long time, it can be very expensive and some symptoms may never fully heal. For these reasons, you also need to know how to seek financial compensation that will meet your future needs and the needs of your family.