Sometimes you bounce back quickly from illnesses and injuries, but other times, the symptoms seem to linger stubbornly for weeks or months. Did you ever come down with a cold after partying straight through from Christmas until Epiphany, only to find that you were still sniffling at Easter? Did you wake up sore the next day after a water skiing adventure, thinking that you just needed to rest, but then your knees and back kept reminding you, weeks later, that you are too old to go water skiing? As painful as an acute injury may be, you can hope that, in a few weeks’ time, it will simply be an entertaining story that you can tell at neighborhood block parties.
Not everyone is so lucky, though. An injury that seems minor at first can cause chronic symptoms severe enough to interfere with your ability to work, and this is as painful for your pocketbook as it is for your body. One of the most troublesome such conditions is post-concussive syndrome. If you are still having symptoms of a concussion after getting injured in a car accident weeks or months ago, contact a Houma car accident lawyer.
A concussion is a mild form of traumatic brain injury (TBI); it happens when something hits you on the head. Motor vehicle accidents are one of the most common causes of concussion; the others are contact sports such as tackle football or rugby, accidental falls, and violent assaults. Doctors diagnose the acute injury as a concussion, instead of TBI proper, if the accident did not involve loss of consciousness, or if the patient lost consciousness for less than a minute but quickly woke up. Concussions usually begin showing symptoms several hours after the accident; you might not develop a headache or dizziness until a few hours after the accident, but it is a good idea to have the injury examined at a doctor’s office or hospital immediately after the accident.
The main symptom of a concussion is a headache, which can feel like a tension headache or a migraine. Other symptoms can include drowsiness, dizziness, nausea with or without vomiting, sensitivity to light, difficulty concentrating or remembering, and mood symptoms such as irritability, depression, or anxiety.
The symptoms usually go away within a few weeks. If they do not, it is post-concussive syndrome. Doctors cannot usually predict which patients will develop post-concussive syndrome based on examining the patient in the first hours or days after the injury occurs. The only available treatment for post-concussion is supportive treatment, which means managing the symptoms and waiting for them to go away on their own. Previous concussions are a risk factor for developing post-concussive syndrome after a new concussion.
Sources
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/post-concussion-syndrome/symptoms-causes/syc-20353352
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