Any traumatic brain injury (TBI) is serious, but the specific impact on your life can vary radically depending on which portion of the brain was damaged. Because of the parietal lobe’s role in gathering and passing on information, suffering trauma to this part of the brain can prevent a victim from caring for themselves. If you’ve sustained a parietal lobe wound, or you are looking after a loved one with this type of TBI, an attorney who specializes in brain injury litigation can help pursue the compensation you are legally owed.
Potential Effects of a Parietal Lobe Traumatic Brain Injury
To fully grasp how a parietal lobe injury can upend your life, you need to understand where it is and what it does. Located near the top, back portion of the head, the parietal lobe spreads across both hemispheres of the brain and rests atop the temporal lobe and underneath the parietal bone.
This critical section of the brain is involved in receiving and interpreting messages from the body, including physical sensations like temperature or skin contact, as well as forming logical conclusions about visual data. Integrating information from the various senses is a core function of the lobe, such as seeing objects, concluding how many are there, and perceiving how far apart they are from each other.
Damage to different areas of the parietal lobe may result in effects like:
- Abnormal or impaired senses, particularly involving touch and spatial distance. Victims may have trouble distinguishing hot and cold, as well as knowing specifically where on the body the sensation is occurring.
- Agraphia, which is the inability to write properly, such as writing gibberish words or misusing syntax and grammar to the point that sentences aren’t understandable.
- Confusing left with right and vice versa.
- Difficulty controlling eye movement or focusing eyes on a specific location.
- Ignoring or forgetting about one specific side of your body and how it interacts with the world. This phenomenon can also extend to other situations, like ignoring the left side of an image or filtering out people standing on your left.
- Inability to comprehend mathematics and the relationship between numbers or amounts.
- Language and speaking disorders.
- Misjudging spatial distances, making it difficult to grab and hold objects.
- Problems with multitasking.
Clearly, these symptoms can result in a drastic reduction in a victim’s overall quality of life. In some cases, the effects of a TBI may prevent the victim from performing basic self-care activities like bathing, dressing, cleaning, and other normal human functions. Virginians who have suffered parietal lobe wounds may become incapable of driving, making themselves effectively understood through email or text, or completing normal tasks like navigating a grocery store and giving correct amounts of money to a checker.
How Parietal Lobe Brain Injuries Occur in Virginia Accidents
Either side of the parietal lobe may be harmed by a closed head wound when the violent motion of an accident causes the brain to move within the skull and sustain damage either from tearing or striking bone.
The parietal lobe is also susceptible to damage during an open head wound when an object pierces bone and penetrates the brain. Parietal injuries can specifically take place in situations like:
- Any trauma to the back or top area of the head
- Boat or pool/drowning accidents
- Car, truck, or SUV collisions
- Motorcycle crashes
- Public transit accidents
- Purposeful or accidental violence, like a bullet wound
- Striking the head during a slip and fall on a sidewalk, in a business, or at a private residence
- Sustaining a head wound during sports activities like football or longboarding
Why You Need a Skilled Attorney After a Parietal Lobe TBI
Depending on the severity of the injury, there are treatments to help deal with common problems after a parietal TBI. Ongoing therapy is available to overcome limitations by utilizing repetitive mental and physical exercises.
Through sensory retraining, balance exercises, and vision practice to focus on the neglected side there is the possibility of regaining some lost functions or finding ways to work around them. These types of physical and occupational therapies are frequently extremely expensive, especially in the long term as they are not quick fixes and require a significant time investment.
You shouldn’t have to worry about how you will pay the bills while trying to get on with your life after a brain injury, which is why you need to consult an attorney. A lawyer can help with the complexities of a brain injury case, both in negotiating with an insurance adjuster and in taking the negligent driver or business to court.
Critically, an attorney helps to ensure the compensation you recover, whether from an insurance payout or settlement offer, is fair and actually accounts for the extreme impact on your life and livelihood. In particular, any damages you recover should include:
- Costs for medical treatments immediately after the accident, like an ER visit or long-term hospital stay
- Future medical costs for surgeries, medication, and rehabilitation
- Emotional damage and mental anguish
- Pain and suffering
- Wages lost during the recovery period, as well as a fair estimate of future earnings lost if you can’t return to work
Calling a personal injury attorney who has dealt with brain injury cases is critical to a financial recovery, but there are steps to take even before your first consultation with a legal professional. After any serious accident, always be sure to:
- Report the incident by alerting management if you slipped and fell at the store or contacting the police after a vehicle collision.
- Get contact information from anyone who saw the injury or the circumstances leading up to the accident and can describe what occurred.
- Begin gathering evidence. Taking pictures of the scene and finding out if security camera footage caught the accident is extremely important.
- See a medical professional quickly, regardless of your pain level after the accident. You want to find internal damage like a TBI immediately to begin treatment as well as start a paper trail on your injury’s costs.
- Set up a consultation with a personal injury attorney. Let the attorney know the basics of your accident so they can determine if you have a strong case and then begin the process of investigating the root cause of your injury.
- Follow the advice of your attorney and medical doctor to prevent an insurance company or the negligent party from paying you less than you deserve.
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