Brain Injury Is Death
Every brain injury — even a so-called “minor” brain injury — is the death of the person who existed before the injury. One’s self — one’s unique personality — is made up of the result of a vast number of complex relationships. Our thoughts. Our ability to think things out. Our attention to some details but not others. Our memories. Our emotions. How we associate some experience with pleasure or pain. How we control, or don’t control our emotions. Our instincts. How our experience and self-control affects our instincts, impulses, or desires. All these interact. The total package — infinitely complex, infinitely unique, makes each of us the complex, unique person we are.
A tiny change in the brain can make an enormous change in the person. Imagine losing the ability to edit your “inside voice”, so every passing thought is spoken out loud. So every coarse impulse is acted out. Imagine losing the sense of humour you once had. Not losing ANY sense of humour — but losing YOURS. Going from a love of puns to laughing only at the most obscene comments. Imagine losing the ability to keep those thoughts quiet. So you say shocking and insensitive things. Imagine losing the ability to understand other people’s emotion as well as before — so you don’t recognize when they are offended. Now you make sexually-explicit comments to people. You think just a little slower, so life is frustrating. Music you once enjoyed is now just irritating noise. You have headaches all the time. You lose the ability to calm yourself, so you get angry at the tiniest things — or at nothing. You swear at people. You lose part of your sense of smell and taste, so food is bland — which makes you angry. You can’t smell things — so you don’t notice you stink. You can’t multitask, so you get confused by everyday tasks. Your memory is impaired, so you forget what you were supposed to do. Making decisions is difficult. You feel tired all the time. You just can’t get motivated to do things — even when you know they must be done. Your work suffers. You become aggressive. Maybe you get fired. Your friends start to avoid you. Your loved ones face the horror of seeing the same face, the same body, but don’t recognize you as YOU anymore. A stranger has invaded your body. Your family tries to stick it out. Some friends hang on for a while. They all think you’ll “get better”, that with time the old you will come back. But no. The old you is dead. There is a new you. And it’s not nice.
Defence doctors will of course say: “It’s a mild brain injury at worst. The damage is small, so the effect MUST be small”. Or they say the damage was caused by something else. They utterly ignore all the legitimate science and insist they “know”. They accuse every friend or family member of the victim of lying. Yet the gold standard for diagnosing a brain injury is the observations of close friends and family. Who else would know if your personality changed? Some ICBC hack, who sees you once, years after the crash?
It’s never “just a brain injury”. It’s not “just a concussion”. There no “mild” in mild traumatic brain injury. Ask every innocent person who has been beaten up by a boxer, football player, or hockey player, who went berserk for no reason. The kind, loving Dr. Jekyll we knew before has become the bestial, violent Mr. Hyde.
Brain injury is the death of self.