A traumatic brain injury can have a variety of symptoms, such as memory loss, mental fog or confusion, fatigue, trouble with motor skills or language skills, and much more. A worker could suffer a TBI in a fall on the job, for example, leading to immediate issues that necessitate emergency medical care.
But if this happens to you, are you fully going to recover from those TBI symptoms? Many people do see recovery immediately after the injury, such as sensitivity to external stimulus declining over the first few days or weeks. But they may plateau after a number of months, when it seems like no more healing is happening.
If you find yourself in this position, it is natural to wonder why you have not fully recovered and if you are ever going to.
Neuroplasticity and connections
The reason why this happens is because the brain often cannot regenerate any neurons. With other injuries, cellular creation or regeneration is possible. Your body can create skin cells and blood cells, for example. But it cannot just create new brain cells in most cases.
Instead, it turns to something known as neuroplasticity, where the brain begins looking for new neural pathways and connections. Different neurons can be connected in a new way to help you overcome lost symptoms, even if you technically will never regenerate the lost brain cells themselves.
But this means that healing can sometimes be limited. You may see improvement as long as your brain is finding new neural pathways, but that improvement could stop if no more pathways are available.
Seeking proper benefits
If you have suffered such a serious injury at work, it can have a significant impact on your career, your wages and the medical bills that you are responsible for. That is why it is so important to understand all of your legal options to seek workers’ comp benefits.