Brain injuries happen pretty frequently. You might sustain one playing sports, or you could slip and fall in a store. You may suffer one if a vehicle hits you or if you fall in the shower.
However you suffer a brain injury, though, if it happens to you, it can disrupt your life quite a bit. There are more serious brain injuries and less severe ones, but whatever the case may be, you need to get medical care to determine how best to move forward.
In this article, we’ll talk about brain injuries, treatment methods, and how you can pay for your care.
Some Brain Injury Varieties
The term “brain injury” covers a lot of ground. This is a term that could mean:
- A concussion
- A stroke
- An aneurysm
You could say that a brain injury is an injury that disrupts normal brain functions, and that’s a perfectly valid statement. However, there are dozens of different ones that fall into that category.
For instance, there’s a concussion, which happens when your brain bounces against your skull’s interior. Football players and other athletes sustain these all the time.
There are strokes, where the brain’s blood supply faces a momentary disruption. The longer blood doesn’t travel to the brain, the worse it is for you.
An aneurysm occurs when a blood vessel or artery’s wall grows weak. It can swell into a blister-like shape.
There are also brain tumors, hemorrhages, encephalitis, carbon monoxide poisoning, or hydrocephalus. All of these cause brain damage in various ways.
How Can You Treat Them?
How a doctor or medical professional treats your brain injury depends on what exactly happened to you. For instance, if you sustain a concussion:
- You’ll have to rest and take some time off work or away from school
- You can’t do anything strenuous while your brain heals
- You may have to wear cold compresses for headache treatment
Besides all that, you may have to lie down a lot as a dizziness and tinnitus treatment. You might have to lie in a dark room, similar to if you have a migraine.
If you have a brain tumor, a doctor might have to operate on you. You may need to go through chemotherapy to try and shrink the tumor.
If you suffer a stroke, you might have to take some physical therapy and speech therapy to get back to your old self. Some people have a stroke, and they recover somewhat. In severe cases, they might never get close to what they were before.
For each brain injury, there are different treatments. None of them are too much fun, and none of them are cheap, either. That brings us to our next point: how to pay for them.
Different Brain Injury Payment Methods
If you suffer some type of brain injury, medical care will not be inexpensive. Medical treatment of any kind costs a lot in this country because we do not have universal healthcare.
Socialized medicine is a contentious political issue, and while some politicians and citizens support it, we don’t have it right now. Medical supply companies, medication manufacturers, and other entities spend billions every year to prevent healthcare socialization.
Until that changes, you need healthcare from somewhere for brain injury treatment. If you don’t have healthcare, you’ll soon find yourself buried beneath a bill pile from which you may never recover. A brain injury could force you to sell all your assets and declare bankruptcy.
If Your Job Gives You Healthcare
You can pay for the treatment if your job gives you healthcare. This is probably the simplest solution. Whether you have to pay anything out of pocket will depend on how good your healthcare is.
It could be that you don’t have great healthcare, and you’ll have to pay a high deductible. The deductible is how much you pay each year before the insurance plan covers the rest. If you don’t have excellent healthcare, that could be thousands of dollars for surgery, physical therapy, speech therapy, etc.
If you have a prominent, high-paying job, you will probably have better healthcare, in which case you might have no copays or deductible. That’s the best possible option for you.
If You Employ Yourself
If you have a self-employment situation, such as if you’re a freelancer or consultant of some type, you probably have to use market-purchased healthcare to pay for your brain injury treatment. Maybe you have great healthcare, but it’s not too likely unless you make lots of money, and you can afford that.
When you employ yourself, decent healthcare costs hundreds every month, while excellent healthcare costs thousands. It could very well be your most significant expense.
Other Options
If you’re an older person and have limited income, you can use Medicare to help with your brain injury treatments. Medicare is what’s supposed to help you if you have paid into it over the years you worked. Now, you can use that money to assist you.
It’s possible you might still have some out of pocket costs, but hopefully, it won’t be too bad.
Brain Injury Concerns
When you find out you have a brain injury, you might worry about it considerably. After all, you can’t fully enjoy your life without proper brain function.
You should listen closely to your doctors and medical team about what to do, and hopefully, your family can help as well. You might feel alone in these moments, but as long as they can support you and help you get through this, you might come out okay on the other side.
So much depends on the brain injury type. If you caught the problem early or the injury was not too severe, you can probably still appreciate the rest of your life.
You might have to work extremely hard to get back to where you were, but withdrawing from your family, friends, profession, etc., is the alternative, and you certainly don’t want that to happen.