Any injury to the head that leads to brain injury is always a serious matter and many cases rehabilitation can take a protracted amount of time. The most common type of injury that leads to this is road traffic accidents, falls, and injuries inflicted by other persons, in other words assaults.
Typical brain injuries are: traumatic, where the brain collides against the inside of the skull; injuries caused be swelling following a trauma; damage to blood vessels; loss of oxygen (for instance in drowning). Over recent years a considerable amount of research has gone into ways of dealing with these types of injury and many more people overcome them than did in the past. Rehabilitation is a complex process that involves hard work from those caring for the patient, the patient herself, and from the wonderful healing process of which the human body is capable. Here we will look at some aspects of this healing process.
The brain cell is called a neuron and the connections between them are called synapses. The whole lot communicate in a manner analogous to the Internet. Brain injury can destroy large numbers of neurons and, as each neuron has many synapses connecting it to the brain network, huge numbers of synapses are also destroyed. An individual connection is called an axon. The damage to the network is what does the damage to the person in terms of loss of physical, cognitive and emotional function.
Emergency surgery followed to repair as much damage as possible and to initiate initial brain injury recapitulation he was placed in an enforced coma. Further surgery followed including replacing part of his skull with a plate made of titanium.
Rehabilitation involves rebuilding this network. To some extent, if synapse damage results in loss of a function, say loss of speech, then other areas of the network can take over this function and speech can be restored. Another healing process is the re-growth of axons. There rate of growth is one millimetre a day and they can grow up to one centimetre in length, which means they can bridge damage of up to one centimetre. There is a thirds process which is the growth of brand new neurones. This is called neurogenesis and has only been discovered recently.
Although the damaged brain has this amazing capacity to heal itself, it is rare that the process will be 100% successful. It is important that any person recovering from brain injury should take a realistic view of what is likely to be achieved. A useful resource for anybody seeking advice on this is the Head Injury Site, a portal to information on rehabilitation and advice on making a head injury claim and obtaining head injury compensation