Working in the field of medicine in any capacity requires you to keep a clear mind and maintain your ability to focus under pressure. In many instances, keeping your focus may even mean the difference between life and death for a patient.
Any injury you may receive on the job can affect your ability to perform your duties, and some injuries can prove more destructive than others. If you receive a head injury, you may not even realize how much it impacts your abilities and focus until you see serious consequences.
If you suffered a blow to the head while at work, then you must take the injury seriously. You may have a mild traumatic brain injury, or TBI, which can quickly disrupt every area of your personal and professional life.
Mild TBIs and diminished focus
Mild TBIs are often difficult injuries to treat because they are not always easy to identify. Unlike a broken arm, which is typically an obvious injury and causes a great deal of pain, a mild TBI may not cause pain or any symptoms at all for up to two weeks after the initial blow. Once it does produce symptoms, a victim may not recognize them at first.
Symptoms may vary, but some symptoms are common. Very often, a victim may find that they cannot focus their attention on any particular task, even a task that is familiar or relatively simple. In addition, victims often grow irrationally upset when they cannot focus. A person who typically handled stress well before a mild TBI may react to frustrations with volatile outbursts.
Anyone who works in medicine understands that this behavior costs their whole team time and resources, and it also puts patients in danger. It is easy to see how this behavior can easily end a victim’s career, possibly in a tragic way.
Misunderstanding context in communication
Another common symptom that can end a career involves understanding the contextual meaning of sentences and phrases a victim reads or hears in conversation. Often, a mild TBI affects a victim by scrambling some of the connections in their brain between vocabulary knowledge and understanding intent.
In other words, a victim may misinterpret things they read or hear, not because they do not understand the individual words used, but because they miss the contextual meaning of the words. In team settings, this can easily cause costly, time-consuming complications. In the field of medicine, these misunderstandings can turn deadly.
Get the help you need now
After any blow to the head, it is important to seek proper medical treatment as soon as possible, especially if it occurs on the job. The sooner that you take this step, the sooner you can begin building a strong claim to keep your rights protected while you heal.