Brain Injury Symptoms and Stress – A Recovering Brain’s Decompensation

Brain Injury Symptoms and Stress: Part Five of Angela’s Story

One of Angela’s biggest brain injury symptoms after the accident is what happens to her cognitive and emotional abilities when she gets stressed.  Yet before the accident, she was like the “big game” player, who the more the stress the better she performed.  Says Angela: “.  In the mortgage industry, there was a lot of challenges, that helps me to fuel, move faster, overcoming those hurdles what made my job exciting for me.”

Brain Injury Symptoms Fall Out

As with too many TBI survivors, Angela’s  after injury abilities (as opposed to disabilities) and the sadness which can pervade her mood raise the question that these changes are not attributable to the wreck, but to who Angela was.  Bad choices and horrible timing may have worsened or only amplified problems that had plagued Angela before.  All of which are brain injury symptoms. Angela was a woman in her 30’s who had left a long term relationship a few months before the wreck, who had sought counseling during that breakup, counseling where non-specific emotional and concentration issues were discussed.  Thus, to honestly assess brain injury symptoms it is important to hear the voices of co-workers and friends as to who Angela was before that day.

The Vice President of her company, the woman who hired Angela had this to say about why they hired Angela initially:

You know, from the interview itself she had the knowledge, first of all, just the firsthand experience of  the position in terms of processing loans, we were a  finance company for a homebuilder.  She was very upbeat, very positive,   through talking to her we  could,   ascertain that she was,  an organized individual in her personal and business life which was the things we were looking for.

But most  importantly that position had a lot of phone contact with customers, and customer service was a really important  aspect of that and just her overall personality and exuberance in her interview, she really kind of won us over in that.  She probably could have even less  experience and we still would have hired her because of  that.

The Vice President found Angela to be everything she had hoped she would be before the brain injury symptoms:

She became one of our higher performers in terms of her ability to, you know, meet the  numbers we were looking for and handle the volume we were  looking for.  She was very good with the customers, she had to work with both some internal customers, our sales  staff, as well was our home builder and then, of course, our borrowers, our external customers, and everybody was  very pleased with her.

She was just one of those people, I can’t claim  to be one, but always happy in life, never really came across anything that was — everything was a positive challenge, if there were any in front of her.  She always had a smile on her face, she was the kind of person that   if you were having a bad day she could pick you up; I  think that was the biggest I thing about her.

And she just was a very  motivated individual, very positive, very encouraging to  everyone, and it was nice to have that around the office,  you don’t always get that.

Her Vice President also described Angela as having excellent organizational and cognitive skills before the brain injury symptoms occured.

When you process loans you have to have a system, to be good at it you have to have a system and a certain way that you work your desk, so to speak.  And everything had a place, she had a system when she came in each day that she followed and, you know, you could just tell she was much more detailed than most.

For Part Six of Angela’s story, click here.