If you suffer a serious brain injury at work, the first question that you and your loved ones may ask is if it is going to heal. You know that this type of severe injury is much different than a broken bone or something of that nature, which will heal when given the time.
Initially, a brain injury does tend to heal rather rapidly. The swelling will go down. The pain will decrease. Tissues around the brain will heal. Blood flow will improve, along with brain chemistry. If you lost a lot of functional ability — perhaps you were in a coma — many of your abilities will return.
Generally, you will see most of your recovery in the first six months. Exactly what this looks like depends on how you were injured, what part of the brain suffered the injury, what skills you lost and many other factors. For instance, you could regain the ability to speak or walk.
Once those first six months have gone by, though, the rate of healing often slows. That is not to say that your abilities can never return or that you can never progress beyond that point, but it does take longer and you may start to identify things that are likely never to heal. Some of the ramifications of a severe brain injury do last for life. When damage is extensive, the brain may physically heal, but the neural pathways may be lost forever — along with the skills that they helped create.
When a workplace injury leads to these types of long-term issues and may mean you can’t return to work, you need to know exactly what legal options you have.