All Brain Injuries Are Different But The Same

What do brain injury survivors have in common?

All the time we talk how all brain injury survivors are different. How each person is different, each injury is different and the effects of injury are different.

The other day on the Brainstorm for Brain Injury Instagram page, someone wrote, “If all brain injuries are different, it means that no one will truly understand my struggles It means I am alone.”

Wow, what a true statement. I am a physician specializing in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and have worked with brain injury survivors for 34 years. Brain injury survivors do have things in common and it is important for all of us to know this.

Survivor’s Own Words

I will tell you what brain injury survivors have told me over and over again. I will talk about survivors from traumatic brain injury. But people with brain injury from other causes typically have these struggles too.

Here is what I have heard:

“I am fatigued, tired, really tired. I can’t do what I could do before the injury. If I try, I get exhausted, overwhelmed and sometimes cannot even function. Before the injury, I could take care of the kids, work and socialize with friends. Now when I get home from work, I am exhausted. I want so badly to do more, but just can’t. Then I feel inadequate. It is so frustrating.”

“My thinking is slow and my memory is not what it was. I can no longer multitask. I can only do one thing at a time. I used to be able to keep many things in my head at once. Now I need a list to keep things straight. Even with a list, I struggle to remember to do things.”

“I get easily irritated and anxious. When other family members are loud, I get irritable. I sometimes lash out and then they get mad at me. I don’t want to lash out. Sometimes it just happens. I get anxious in loud settings. I no longer like large gatherings. My friends don’t understand and I have lost many.”

Common Problems After Any Brain Injury

Some of the most common difficulties after traumatic brain injury are fatigue, slow processing speed, decreased attention and short term memory, and irritability. Not every survivor has these symptoms. But many do. Perhaps we should focus more on talking about what is common to so many people after brain injury. Perhaps we should educate people on what it really feels like to have these common symptoms.

People who have not experienced brain injury often do not understand. They do not understand how hard brain injury survivors must work to improve. How survivors often need to reinvent their lives. How their families need to reinvent their relationships. They do not understand that they may not be just like they used to be. They do not understand that with some support, things will go better.