A clean CT scan is not proof you are fine.

A CT scan in an emergency room is looking for bleeding, swelling, and skull fracture, which are the things that require immediate intervention. It is good at that and it is not designed to detect diffuse axonal injury or the microstructural damage typical of a mild TBI. A normal CT means you are not in immediate danger. It does not mean your brain was not injured, and insurers use it as though it does.

Headaches, light and noise sensitivity, sleep disruption, short-term memory problems, difficulty holding attention, word-finding trouble, irritability, and depression commonly develop or intensify over the weeks after the injury. Because they arrive late and overlap with stress and pain, they get attributed to everything except the head injury, including by treating physicians focused on more visible fractures.

Insight is itself frequently affected. People with a brain injury commonly underreport, describing themselves as fine while family and colleagues see someone noticeably changed. This is why the accounts of spouses, parents, co-workers, and supervisors matter so much in a TBI case, and why a claim built only on the client's own description tends to understate the injury.

The bills already incurred are usually modest relative to the actual harm. What matters is the career that no longer works, the education not finished, the capacity not regained. Proving that takes neuropsychological testing, vocational assessment, and often an economist, rather than a stack of medical bills. One of our brain injury cases involved a planned career in the U.S. Navy that ended before it started.

It is a personal injury claim in which a traumatic brain injury is the principal harm. A traumatic brain injury is damage to the brain from an external force: a blow to the head, a violent jolt, or the rapid acceleration and deceleration a crash produces. It does not require losing consciousness and it does not require striking your head on anything. The claim seeks compensation for the medical care, the lost earning capacity, and the lasting effect on the person's life.

Yes, and this is the single most common misunderstanding in these cases. An emergency CT is looking for bleeding, swelling, and fractures, the conditions that need immediate treatment. It is not designed to detect the diffuse microstructural damage typical of a mild traumatic brain injury. A normal scan means you were not in immediate danger; it is not evidence that the brain was uninjured, though insurers routinely present it that way.

Commonly headaches, sensitivity to light and noise, disrupted sleep, short-term memory problems, difficulty sustaining attention, slowed processing, word-finding difficulty, dizziness, irritability, anxiety, and depression. They frequently develop or worsen over the weeks following the injury rather than appearing immediately, which is part of why they get attributed to stress or to other injuries instead of to the head injury itself.

Earlier than for most injuries, for two reasons. The documentation that proves a TBI, particularly neuropsychological testing and contemporaneous accounts from family and employers, is far more persuasive when it is created as the symptoms develop than when it is assembled afterwards. And early settlement offers in these cases are made while the record still shows only a normal scan. A settlement cannot be reopened once the effects prove permanent.

Medical expenses already incurred and reasonably expected in the future, lost wages and lost future earning capacity, the cost of rehabilitation and any long-term care or support required, and non-economic damages for pain, suffering, and the loss of the ability to do things the person could do before. In a serious TBI the future components are usually far larger than the bills already received, which is why they have to be proved rather than estimated.

Missouri generally allows five years from the date of injury for most personal injury claims, and three years for a wrongful death claim. Those are the filing deadlines rather than the practical ones. In a brain injury case the useful window is much shorter, because the evidence that proves the injury is built from contemporaneous medical records and observations that cannot be created retrospectively.