Those who survive serious car accidents in California without any apparent injuries might regard themselves fortunate. However, some suffer head trauma that remains hidden for days or even weeks before cognitive difficulties become noticeable. The mental problems they cause could affect every aspect of the victim’s life.
Some victims experience an overall reduction of intelligence. Cognitive impairment consequences could prevent crash victims from going back to work and might even make them unable to navigate their day-to-day lives.
People who suffer from cognitive impairment have difficulty acquiring knowledge and understanding messages or ideas. The following challenges often form part of the changes with which they have to deal:
- Impaired judgment, reasoning and problem-solving skills
- Unfamiliar problems with assembling, organizing, planning and decision-making
- Trouble controlling desires and impulses
- Concentration problems like focusing on more than one thing at a time, such as eating and having a conversation
- Restlessness and impatience causing problems with sitting in one place or listening to conversations for long times
- Problems with understanding information and then processing it, including reading and understanding newspapers, books and magazines
- Delayed reactions making usual activities like driving, cooking and other routine tasks challenging and, in some cases, dangerous
Verbal expression
Along with all the mentioned impairments that jeopardize brain injury victims’ personal and professional lives, their social lives will be adversely affected. Communication and language problems could include finding appropriate words when talking or writing and navigating a conversation from start to end without getting lost in between. Some head trauma patients lose the ability to coordinate facial expressions and body language to the conditions and circumstances.
Brain injuries could affect every aspect of the victim’s life, including physical and emotional, family dynamics, career and social life. Financial consequences could be severe. If the head trauma occurred in a car accident caused by another driver’s negligence, the California civil justice system would allow the victim to file a personal injury lawsuit to pursue financial relief to cover past and future economic and emotional damages.