Everybody has probably suffered a bonk on the head. They happen all the time. You make a turn around a blind corner in the hall and, smack! You run into someone coming in the other direction.
Maybe as you’re driving down a parking lot lane in a San Antonio shopping mall, someone pulls suddenly out of a parking spot and smashes into your car. No airbags deploy. No blood is spilled. You consider yourself lucky that you didn’t suffer anything more than a head whack into the driver’s side window. Then you make the mistake of thinking nothing more of it.
What is becoming clearer with almost every passing week is that such seemingly minor accidents can actually result in some very serious brain injuries — the kind of injuries that could wind up affecting you for the rest of your life. If someone else caused the accident, you might feel it could be hard to prove cause and effect. But you do have the right to hold the negligent person responsible. An attorney should be consulted.
As a recent National Public Radio report reveals, researchers believe that hundreds of thousands of potentially serious brain injuries are suffered every year. But because the circumstances don’t seem to amount to much, the victims and even their doctors fail to spot the signs of traumatic brain injury.
Such was the case for a Washington, D.C., man. Being a doctor himself, you might think that he would have been more sensitive to brain injury indicators he began to suffer after he hit his head in his attic.
Over a course of weeks, this doctor began to notice a shuffle in his gait. He was dropping things a lot and others began to comment that he was somehow different. When he finally went to a neurosurgeon about the problems, an MRI revealed he had suffered a subdural hematoma — a pool of blood in his skull. He was rushed to the hospital for immediate brain surgery.
Now, we acknowledge that this doctor’s accident isn’t one that can be blamed on anyone else. But the point of this post is that it can be easy to overlook getting checked — even for a doctor. And for the protection of rights after an accident, victims should consult an attorney.
