What is brain injury?
Brain injury means that the brain have been seriously damaged by a disease or an accident. Brain injury, for example, can come through a brain contusion, a CVA (stroke) or a brain tumor.
Damage to the brain can have serious consequences: for your body, for your feelings and your thinking. You may get:
- sleep problems;
- problems with;
- hearing problems;
- problems with smell and taste;
- problems moving;
- problems with your memory and your concentration;
- problems with how you respond. For example, you can be more emotional or indifferent. Some people are faster angry.
The damage to the brain can no longer cure. However, other parts of the brain take over the job of the damaged parts sometimes.
The most important investigations with which a doctor looks at whether you brain injury, a CT scan and an MRI scan. That make the brain visible on a computer screen.
Therapies at brain injury are physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy. For these therapies do people with brain injuries often go to a rehabilitation center.
What are the symptoms of brain injury?
Brain injury has huge consequences. Do you have any brain injury than to see your life will look completely different. What exactly are the consequences for you, depends on two things: what place in your brain is damaged and how bad is the damage. The complaints are complaints that can be prevented. Not everyone has all these complaints.
Physical complaints:
- headache, tired, dizzy;
- more or less interest in sex;
- less see, smell, taste or hear;
- problems moving by example, spasticity, hemiplegia or balance disorders.
- you will experience feelings less strong or intense;
- your mood can change overnight;
- coercion and compulsion to laugh cry: no reason you suddenly bursts out laughing or crying;
- you are passive, apathetic;
- you do things impulsively, without thinking first;
- you can not always behave 'as it should be. "
- difficulty concentrating;
- trouble remembering things;
- things do not understand or less rapidly;
- problems with the use of language (aphasia).
Treatment of brain injury
The first time after a brain injury is you in the hospital. This is an uncertain time. It is very difficult to estimate how it will continue. What you can learn and what are the limitations you will have to learn to live with it?
Once you're ready, start with your rehabilitation. You are going to get out of bed during the day and you will get physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy. The therapists encourage you to start using your senses: hear, see, smell, taste and feel. Further practice your thinking ability.
A time after you have taken your brain injury doctor might know how things stand. How far are you restored and what therapies do you still need? For that you get a Neuropsychological research.
In such a study looks the doctor how well your brain works. How well you can remember things? And you can concentrate? The examination takes about two hours. The doctor talks to you and you do some testing.
Living with brain injury
Life after brain injury often looks different. Once you're out of the hospital, you have to handle quite a bit: many things that were once taken for granted, are no longer succeed. Now find many of the mourning place.
During your rehabilitation, you gradually picks up daily life again: back to work, again meet up with people, in short: as much as possible to live independently. This period looks out for everyone else. You can return to your own house and your old job? Whether you need another job or a modified form of housing search? Can you drive? You can get all these things supervision of the rehabilitation center.
It is important that you really know what you can still do and what is not going so well. Maybe you have some of these recommendations:
- Give yourself plenty of rest.
- Hide your limitations not for others.
- Do one thing at a time when you have concentration problems.
- Repeat information to yourself several times. If you use the better.
- Make yourself have a fixed daily or weekly format if you suffer from mood changes. This offers support.
- Have changed your sexual needs? Talk to your partner. And if you can not together, you can get professional help through your GP.
Residential opportunities for children, youth and adults with brain injury
Some children, youth and adults with brain can not live at home. This may have to do with the care that is needed.
Possibilities include a nursing home or a way of living, for example, small-scale housing or a large housing form. Most residential care for people with physical disabilities have separate departments for children and young people with brain injuries.
The rehabilitation center together with you to what is possible.
Living in a housing form is often a huge transition. In small groups work the residents to their independence. There is much attention to the recovery of a daily routine. For people with brain injury is very important. Many memories are in fact way, people should learn to speak all over again and experience.
Advice for relatives of people with brain injuries
People with brain injuries are usually somewhat rigid in their thinking and behavior. They can no longer empathize with other people. Therefore it is often the people around them who have to adapt. Here are some general recommendations for dealing with someone with a brain injury.
- People with brain injuries often have difficulty with communication. They understand you are not always good. Use simple language and short sentences. Sometimes it is necessary to use images.
- Has anyone suffered from mood swings? That can be very annoying for the person himself. Perhaps it helps to divert attention.
- One does things that do not belong? If anyone has other behavior that is not desirable? Try him to learn as quickly as possible, before it becomes a habit. One good way is to ignore the behavior. You're not going in there. And behavior that is just that accepted and desired that encourages you.
- It's not easy to discuss unwanted behavior. Patients can criticism as a threat because they often can not properly in perspective. Furthermore, many people with brain injuries do not have enough control over their own behavior in order to change it. Try anyway to discuss the behavior carefully.
- Can a person be unwanted behavior does not change, try to accept it and try to provoke as little as possible.