Your children are your primary care and responsibility and you do your best to protect them. The recklessness, negligence, and inattention of others is an ever-present threat to your babies. And it only takes one such person to forever change the life of your child and your family for the worse.
A traumatic brain injury, known as TBI, occurs when a violent incident causes severe damage to the brain. TBI can be the result of a fall, a car accident, a sports injury, a mishap in a recreational area, and many other types of incidents. Accidents that impact the brain can have an especially devastating impact on children. A child under the age of 16 has still not fully grown yet, which makes all their bones and muscles fragile. An accident that may cause only a mild concussion in an adult can lead to serious and permanent brain injury in a child.
The Symptoms of a Traumatic Brain Injury
Brain injury symptoms range from mild to severe. After an accident, your child may remain conscious or experience loss of consciousness for a short period of time. They may complain of dizziness, headache, lightheadedness, ringing in the ears, or a bad taste in their mouth, or you may see indications of these yourself. You should take your child to the emergency room immediately to have them examined. The emergency room physicians who examine your child can determine whether they have suffered a concussion and offer treatment for it.
A severe brain injury is quite different. If your child has suffered TBI they may go into convulsions or seizures, they may be knocked unconscious and be unable to wake up, and the pupils of their eyes may become dilated. Not everyone who has been a victim of severe brain injury will present these symptoms. Victims of the condition may also experience slurred speech. They may in the hours, days, and weeks after the accident lose the ability to coordinate their bodily movements; they may also become confused, restless, and constantly agitated.
The Life and Financial Consequences of Traumatic Brain Injury in Children
A child who is a TBI victim will need to be hospitalized. They may need to undergo a series of invasive procedures. Following their hospitalization, they will need to undergo rehabilitation. They will need to go through physical, occupational, and speech therapy. Although advances are being made all the time in neuroscience and brain surgery, in most instances little can be done by medical personnel to reverse the injury and repair the damaged brain cells.
The most severe types of traumatic brain injury can be life-altering. Your child may have problems thinking and reasoning; they may lose their sense of taste, sight, or hearing; they may find it difficult to communicate; and they may have life-long problems with anger, aggression, depression, and anxiety.
Dealing with TBI as a parent can be overwhelming. It is not something that any parent is prepared for. Your child will nevertheless need your support as they recover. The latter process requires large amounts of time and money. In the most severe cases, either you or your partner may have to give up work to care for your child.
This is not something that most families have the resources to sustain. If your child is the victim of a traumatic brain injury caused by someone else’s recklessness or negligence, then you should take legal action.
How a Lawyer Can Help
Contacting a lawyer is one of the first moves you should make after your child’s accident. A lawyer will help you get to the bottom of what exactly caused the traumatic brain injury. Even if your child was in a bad accident, the TBI may not have been caused by the impact but by the medical treatment that was given in response to it.
Medical personnel often cause brain injury when treating patients. This is the result of negligence, inattention, incompetence, and other forms of malpractice. Your child may have been injured owing to:
-Anaesthesia errors
-The delay of proper intubation
-Failure to monitor vital signs
-Errant surgical incision into the brain during emergency surgery
The first thing your lawyer will do is launch their own investigation into the accident and the hospital where your child was treated. They will employ their own professional investigators to re-interview witnesses, obtain cell phone camera footage of the accident, gather forensic evidence from the accident, and make inquiries into he emergency room team that treated your child.
The main aim of your lawyer will be to hold to account the people responsible for the pain and suffering of your child. It may turn out that you can sue the person who caused the accident and the hospital that treated your child, as both may have contributed to their TBI.