Kyle House
Psychology 101
11/08/07
Writing Project #1: Traumatic Brain Injury
Justin loved the feel of the wind in his hair. To him, riding down the highway under the open skies on his brand new Yamaha R1 represented freedom. Little did he know this would shortly change. His carefree attitude made him vulnerable to Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). Justin became a statistic.
Every 23 seconds one person in the United States is affected by head trauma. More than 2% of the United States population suffers from some form of TBI disability. TBI occurs when an outside force impacts the head hard enough that it causes damage to the skull which in turn can result in injury to the brain through either force or actual piercing by the skull. The damage done to the brain is often serious and can be permanent depending on the region afflicted. Most injuries cause focal damage confined to the area of the brain injured but in some cases diffuse axonal brain injuries can also result. These injuries most commonly occur due to motor vehicle accidents, falls, blows, gunshot wounds, and sports injuries. As a result of MVAs the frontal and temporal lobes are most commonly injured as the brain moves back and forth within the skull. These are the speech and language centers which usually lead to communication difficulties following head injury.
The brain is vulnerable to TBI in two ways. When the head strikes a hard object (or is struck by an object) this can lead to contusion or a bruise of the cerebral cortex. In motor vehicle accidents when the airbag comes out to protect the driver and passengers many are affected by whiplash. There are varying degrees of this but when the head is whiplashed without actually hitting an object, diffuse axonal injury can occur in the deep white matter.
In some cases the axons are under so much pressure that they are stretched which lead to damage in neural processing.
While traumatic brain injury can affect a person of any age it is far more common in males between ages 15-25 because of their high risk lifestyles. In Justin’s case he was riding on the highway without his helmet at nearly 90 miles per hour. It had rained lightly earlier in the day and there were some puddles along the way. Justin just wanted to take a break from studying and get some fresh air so he decided to take his bike for a spin. It did not even occur to him that his carelessness would cause any real problems. The next thing he knew he was waking up in the Emergency Room. The doctors and his family told him he had a mild concussion and some contusions. He was lucky this time as things could have been much worse given the circumstances. This type of concussion caused diffuse axonal injury which can either be temporary or permanent. Justin was told that because he would only know this with time as it takes a few months to sometimes a year for concussions to heal. Even though his brain injury was mild he still needed surgery to remove a few contusions, or bruised brain tissue on the frontal lobe. For several months Justin had some communication problems, including word-finding difficulty, poor sentence formation, mild dsyarthria (slow and slurred speech) and dysphagia (difficulty in swallowing). Justin had to attend weekly speech therapy and in about a year was able to improve his communication skills.
Now, Justin is back on his feet living an active life of a college student. This was a really close call for him but it has taught him not to take chances and to wear his helmet even if he’s just riding to the local store. After his brush with TBI, Justin has begun a campaign to promote helmet awareness among students in his city.