HAMILTON BRAIN INJURY LAWYER

Traumatic Brain Injury Lawyers in Hamilton, serving Ontario

By Matt Lalande

Accident victims who suffer a traumatic brain injury often must endure a very long and expensive recovery and more often than not – they will rarely ever be the same.

Brain injuries are very common causes of disability and death in both adults and children and can be caused by something as mild as a bump or contusion, can be moderate to severe in nature due to a serious concussion, open wound, a fractured skull bone, or from internal bleeding and damage to the brain.Traumatic brain injuries are among the most severe injuries and are in large part caused in slip and falls, pedestrian accidents, motorcycle accidents, car accidents and trucking accidents. Serious brain injuries may result from anywhere between a simple blow to the head to a penetrating injury to the brain. Frontal and temporal areas of the brain are the main areas involved in serious car accidents – which often cause immediate complaints like:

• forgetfulness
• concentration issues
• stuttering
• memory loss
• headaches
• dizziness
• cognitive impairment
• and neuropsychiatric symptoms like anxiety, irritability, depression, PTSD and sleep disorders.

If you or a loved one has suffered a brain injury caused by someone else, it is important to understand your legal right to pursue financial compensation to replace your lost wages and for your pain and suffering. The person or company who caused your injury may be responsible for your future health care needs, lost wages, housekeeping, home maintenance, attendant care needs, and pain and suffering compensation among other things.

Different types of head injury

The following are some of the different types of head injuries:

Concussion – which is an injury to the head area that may cause instant loss of awareness or alertness for a few minutes up to a few hours after the traumatic event.

Skull fracture – There are 4 major of common skull fractures, including the following:

• Linear skull fractures – are the most common type of skull fracture. There is a break in the skull bone but usualy it is a single fracture line.
• Depressed skull fractures – With type of fracture part of the skull is actually sunken in from the trauma. This type of skull fracture may require surgery, depending on how serious the injury.
• Diastatic skull fractures – These are fractures that occur along the suture lines in the skull. The sutures are the areas between the bones in the head that fuse when we are children.
• Basilar skull fracture. – This involves a break in the bone at the base of the skull – and is normally a very serious injury. These victim usually require close observation in the hospital.

Intracranial hematomas (ICH) – These are otherwise known as blood clots in or around the brain. The different types are classified by their location in the brain and can range from mild quite serious and potentially life-threatening type brain injuries injuries. The different types of ICH are:

• Epidural hematoma –collection of blood in potential space between the outer layer of the dura mater and the inner table of the skull. EH’s happen in approximately 10% of traumatic brain injuries (TBI) requiring hospitalization. Most traumatic EH’s a result of head injury due to motor vehicle collisions, physical assaults, or accidental falls.
• Subdural hematoma – occur when a blood clot forms outside of the brain, underneath the skull and underneath the dura. These can form from a tear in the veins that go from the brain to the dura, or from a cut on the brain itself.
• Contusion or intracerebral hematoma – is a brian injury that is more localized and can be compared to a bruise – caused by a forceful blow to the head.
• Diffuse axonal injury (DAI) – This form of traumatic brain injury is fairly common and are usually caused by shaking of the brain back and forth, which can happen in serious accidents, from falls or from shaken baby syndrome. This type of injury occurs when the brain rapidly shifts inside the skull as an injury is occurring. The long connecting fibers in the brain called axons are sheared as the brain  accelerates and decelerates inside the hard bone of the skull. This type of injry typically causes injury to many part of the brain, and people who suffer a DAI more often than not remain in a coma.

The Long-Term Impact of a Brain Injury

905-333-8888

Brain Injuries

Serious brain injuries can no doubt cause problems that are life-changing and incapacitating. The brain is the major control network for the body’s functions and abilities, and it enables conscious communication with our body. It ensures automatic operation of vital organs; the ability to think and reason; and enables functions such as memory, speech, the senses, emotional responses, and more.

Losing even a portion of one of these capabilities can be significant—if not devastating—for the victim and his or her family. Brain injuries can cause lifelong medical complications and require an experienced injury lawyer who can assist the victim and family with obtaining the necessary long-term help and care.

If your loved one is experiencing such things as difficulty processing information, expressing thoughts, concentrating, making decisions, memory loss, balance issues, headaches, or slurring speech, then he or she should be immediately evaluated for brain damage following a traumatic event.

Proving a brain injury can be challenging and expensive. In order to ensure that your legal rights are protected, you will need to speak to a Hamilton brain injury lawyer who is experienced in handling the complex legal area of personal injury claims involving head and brain trauma.

Brain Damage Symptoms and what they mean to the victim

After a serious accidents, CT head and MRI are normally used to measure changes in anatomical or physiological parameters of TBI. These include hemorrhage, edema, vascular injury, and intracranial pressure. There are different kinds of brain injuries – with the two most common being traumatic and acquired. A traumatic brain injury (TBI) is caused by an external force, such as a hard impact or hit to the head. The impact causes the brain to move inside the skull, which in turn can damage the brain.

Comparatively, an acquired brain injury (ABI) is a brain injury that happens at the cellular level and is associated with pressure inside the brain caused by things such as a stroke. The Mayo Clinic tells us that with a TBI, a person may experience the following symptoms:

• Loss of consciousness
• Confusion and disorientation
• Headaches
• Nausea
• Fatigue or drowsiness
• Difficulty sleeping
• Sleeping more than usual
• Dizziness or loss of balance
• Word-finding problems and concentration difficulties
• Sensory problems, such as blurred vision and ringing in the ears
• Sensitivity to light or sound
• Memory or concentration problems
• Mood changes or mood swings
• Feeling depressed or anxious
• Confusion, agitation, or unusual behavior
• Disorientation
• Change in eating habits
• Persistent crying
• Unusual or easy irritability
• Changes in sleep habits
• Sad or depressed mood
• Loss of interest in favorite toys or activities
• Vomiting

Financial Compensation for Treatment

If you have suffered a life-changing brain injury, it’s important to speak to a brain injury lawyer as soon as possible in order to ensure that your (or your loved one’s) treatment is properly set up and funded after you are discharged from the hospital or brain injury-rehabilitation unit. You may require such assistance as:

Attendant Care and Rehabilitation Therapy – you may require assistance with your day to day activities or re-establishing positive every day routines and transportation on a supervised basis. Rehabilitation therapy can also help suffering individuals relearn skills such as walking, list-making, communicating or self-care. Rehabilitation therapy for a brain injured individual can include different kinds of therapy for cognitive difficulties. Depending on the injury, these treatments may be needed only briefly after the injury, occasionally throughout a person’s life, or permanently.

Psychotherapy – you or your loved one may require ongoing funding for group support, education or long-term support. Not surprisingly, the consequences of head injury often can also have affect on the individual’s family as well. It is not uncommon for family members to need and receive information for the best involvement, counseling and emotional support as well as help with recognition of the family’s needs, adjustment and eventually, a good functional outcome.

Physical Therapy – often not thought on within a life-care plan, physical therapy is a more often than not a necessary requirement for an individual that suffers a traumatic brain injury. Individual with cognitive injury may not appreciate the need for exercise and care for health. Personal support or rehabilitation workers are often necessary since individuals with brain injuries do not make exercise a priority, are unable to drive after their injury (thus they have difficulty getting to a gym or place to exercise). Physical limitations also impact the kinds of exercises and types of exercise machines that can be used safely – which can place them at risk of injuring themselves while exercising.

Medication – brain injured individuals may require the monitored intake of medications such as anti-convulsants, analgesics for pain, anti-psychotic (for hostility, nervousness and severe agitation), anti-depressants, anti-anxiety medication, muscle relaxants or stimulants to increase levels of responsiveness or alertness.

Management of Sleep Dysfunction – Immediately following a traumatic brain injury, the difficulty in falling asleep and frequent waking is very a common occurrence. If chronic sleep disturbances develops, medication or cognitive behavioral therapy focused on sleep may be necessary.

Speech Therapy – severe accidents may damage portions of the brain that are responsible for language. More often than not, individuals that suffer a severe brain injury can be left with stuttering and word finding issues, making it very difficult or impossible to communicate effectively.

Vocational Therapy – often occupational therapists are retained on a temporary or life-long basis to assist with vocational therapy to assist with finding solutions to appropriate job opportunities, help with work place challenges, ergonomic requirements, or with general everyday transportation. Occupational therapists can make a positive difference in a brain individual’s life.

Financial Compensation for Brain Injury Victims

If you or a loved one has suffered a catastrophic brain injury you may be entitled to compensation, which is subdivided into economic and non-economic claims.

Economic Claims –  or special damage, are calculable and are awarded to compensate injured victims for: i) incurred expenses (i.e. prescription medication, physiotherapy, massage therapy, etc.), ii) loss of earning capacity and/or income – wage –  loss (i.e. early retirement, loss of RSP and/or CPP contributions, loss of competitive advantage, loss of earnings, etc.), iii) future care costs (i.e. projected expenses for medical treatment, attendant care, housekeeping/home maintenance, etc.) iv) housekeeping losses, if you no longer have the capacity to care for your home, or you do but at a reduced level.  iv) future management fees (i.e. corporate and/or non-corporate guardians hired to administer a damages award). Unlike non-economic damages, economic damages do not have a monetary cap or upper limit—rather they are assessed by comparing the injured person’s pre-accident versus post-accident circumstances, and providing monetary compensation for post-accident economic losses the injured claimant has sustained and/or incurred.

Non-Economic claims – are claims such as compensation for damages for pain and suffering, loss of enjoyment of life, loss of amenities ect. Pain and suffering damages are awarded to compensate a brain injury victim for pain and suffering stemming from his or her injuries sustained as a result of another’s negligent action(s). Pain and suffering, in short, are one’s physical, social, emotional and/or psychological accident-induced impairments which adversely affect one’s enjoyment of life. Pain and suffering awards are not objectively calculable, but rather courts will review your brain injury lawyer’s case that is presented when arriving at an amount to award you. Such factors include, however are not limited to: one’s age, pre-accident versus post-accident lifestyle, degree of the sustained injury and impairment, duration of the sustained injury and impairment, the victim’s function and reliance on others, etc.

Proving a Brain Injury – How our Brain Injury Lawyers can help you or your loved ones.

1-844-LALANDE

Call Us Today

The trial of a case involving an individual with a brain injury involves significant and often unique forensic challenges. The challenge to a brain injury lawyer in presenting these cases and obtaining proper compensation for a person that suffered a brain injury is the misunderstandings concerning the consequences of an acquired brain injury.  Not only do victims typically look “normal,” but judges and juries, defense lawyers and claims adjusters, mistakenly believe that there cannot be a permanent brain injury unless there is objective evidence (meaning that you an see) such as a blow to the head, loss of consciousness, and positive imaging on an MRI or CT scan—though none of these commonly-accepted “facts” is true.

In order to successfully overcome these misconceptions, a multi-pronged approach consisting of appropriate experts, lay witnesses, analogies based on jurors’ real-world experiences, and demonstrative evidence is necessary, such as:

Establishing That the Force Was Sufficient to Cause a Significant Brain Injury: In the case of a traumatic brain injury, in order to establish entitlement to recovery, it is important, and sometimes critical, to establish that the force of the impact to the brain (not necessarily the head) is sufficient to cause a significant brain injury.  Many Brain injury victims often look uninjured, may not have lost consciousness, and has normal imaging studies.  A jury must be convinced that the nature and location of the injury claimed by the plaintiff could be the result of the force involved.

Demonstrating the injury through Friends, Co-Workers and Family Testimony – It is vital that testimony from family members, coworkers, and other observers provide examples of how the plaintiff has changed since the injury.

Demonstrating the injury through imaging:  often times, a brian injury case presentation is better when the jury can see a “picture” of the brain injury.  There are various forms of imaging, and this field is evolving rapidly.CT Scans and MRIs.  A traditional CT or MRI of the brain is an image in which images are taken in multiple slices to study the structure of the brain.  These images can be presented in many planes of orientation, though most often they are presented as if the brain were sliced perpendicular to the face.  There are three keys, however, to understanding the significance of these the images:

1. Traditional MRIs and CTs only show structure, and not function, of the brain. An MRI cannot even distinguish whether a person is dead or alive, or asleep or awake, much less whether there has been a loss of cognitive function or memory.  It is the equivalent of taking a picture of the engine of a car and trying to ascertain whether the car will run or how it will perform on the road.
2. The resolution of CT and MRI images is a function of the quality of the equipment and how long the machine is gathering data. But even under the best of circumstances, the resolution of these images is far too low to see diffuse damage to the brain that is occurring on an axonal level.  There are literally millions of brain cells between the pixels of even the best traditional MRI machines.
3. Many, if not most, of CTs and MRIs that are taken when the patient presents in the emergency room are not intended to reveal the often subtle findings of brain injury. The physicians are looking for acute life threatening problems that require immediate attention, such as evacuating a bleed that is placing pressure on the brain. If the MRI is normal immediately after the accident, it does not mean that it will remain normal after some of the possible results of brain injury, such as brain atrophy, evolve thereafter.

Thus, in many, if not most cases of traumatic brain injury, the initial imaging studies are abnormal.  If there are abnormalities on CT or MRI, so much the better to establish an injury— especially in correlation with impact vectors, neuropsychologic evaluation, and functional imaging.  But if these studies are normal, other accepted techniques may help to demonstrate the brain injury.

Neuropsychological Testing: neuropsychological testing can reveal the nature and extent of cognitive deficits and the victim’s ability to function.  If neuro-psychologic testing results showing impairments to a particular area or global function of the brain can be correlated with the imaging results, the testimony of lay witnesses, and the nature of the force involved, the circle of demonstrating an injury to the brain will be closed.

Other Demontrative Evidence:  using visual exhibits makes the case more interesting to a jury and helps them to understand what happened and how it has affected the plaintiff.

Contact our Hamilton brain injury lawyers today

If you or your loved one has suffered a serious brain injury, contact us 24/7 by submitting an online inquiry or by calling us directly at 903-333-8888. Our Hamilton brain injury lawyers will be more than happy to discuss your legal options with you at  your convenience.