TBI Symptoms:Physical Problems Masked TBI

TBI Symptoms: Craig Part Thirteen 

Craig tells about how he had so many physical injuries caused by the accident that the TBI symptoms were masked by all his physical problems.

Now, with respect to your arm or shoulder problem, there are physical injuries that you might have had in the accident.  You are in a car that has a head-on collision and then rolls, so there can be a significant amount of physical injuries that you have, not specifically the spasticity which is more a neurologic thing. But did you have some physical injuries that took a while to heal?

Yeah, the broken ribs, those hurt for a little while.  I had six broken ribs,  the cracked teeth because I busted out a bunch of teeth – bruising. I still have the bruising where it bruised right here. It’s kind of gone away but some of the bruising, that was like just one big bruise for almost a year.

I had a big bruise right here which is gone, you can barely see the stitches.  They put more into the plastic surgery than they did my cognitive rehab.

One of the problems we’ve known for a long time is that when there are other physical injuries, brain injury symptoms often get missed.  Would that explain why they didn’t see the spasticity in your arm and shoulder?

Oh yeah, because the ribs, they just thought it was pretty natural.  It really didn’t dominate because I was too sore to really move much for a month or two.

Yeah, it was amazing, they said, that I didn’t have more damage by the vehicle because again you could see where my head was and it’s just, it was amazing.

Did you have any neck or back injuries?

Whiplash and they treated that with the bands and so forth. But that was the least of my problems.

Those injuries got better?

Yeah.

No structural disc injuries?

No, no.

What did they do for the spasticity?

They did some Botox shots which was the first thing that really, really helped because it was too painful to even really move my arms.  The Botox made it so that I could do some of the physical therapies.  And the bands, the band therapy, I actually went outside of my network because, obviously my wife worked in the physical therapy department, so I went into another network and paid or it out of pocket at that point.

Now, you said they were concerned that you were going to have difficulty walking, but you didn’t.

Yeah.  Well, because of the type of injury, because of where it was it’s very common to lose,  speech, mobility.  It was just amazing they said that I didn’t go into a deeper coma.

Because you had such a remarkable recovery they didn’t look for the more subtle but serious issues such as behavioral questions?

They didn’t.  They gave me a flyer.  I remember that’s what they gave me, here, here’s a flyer on brain injury.   Even though they knew I had a brain injury they never – the diagnosis of that didn’t come until the neuropsychologist, which is interesting.

Next in Part Fourteen – Speech and Metronome Therapy Helps TBI Recovery