Brain Injuries

My maternal grandfather lived the last sixty years or so of his life with the effects of a traumatic brain injury so all my life I’ve been acutely aware of how brain injury can impact a person’s life and their family. Sometimes brain injury is called the death of a person who is still living. Memory, reason, temperament, and personality may all be impaired in strange and inconsistent ways. Traits that were minor idiosyncrasies before may expand into debilitating obstacles. The effect may be devastating to the person’s relationships, occupation, income, school performance, and overall quality of life. However may appear just fine physically and seem normal in casual encounters. To make matters worse, friends, family members, coworkers, and employers may not understand or sympathize with an injury they cannot see. Employment and marriages both often fail. A person who was functioning at a very high level before may still function as well as most of the population but compared to their high function before they got hurt has suffered a tremendous loss. When a person suffers multiple serious physical injuries, the focus is often on those and not on the brain injury that is not readily visible. So, that is often overlooked with sinister outcomes. Broken bones can heal but the unseen injury in a bruised brain may never fully recover. Fortunately here in Atlanta we have two great brain injury rehab facilities: the Shepherd Center and Emory for Traumatic Brain Injury rehab program. Both are excellent. Now we have represented a lot of folks with brain injuries who benefited greatly from both of those programs and we’ve enjoyed working with their teams and documenting injuries and developing life care plans. Recently we represented a traumatic brain injury survivor whose church sponsored a charity run to benefit the family. I ran the race with his therapists from Shepherd. They were a lot younger and faster, but I won my age group. I was the only one that old running. In brain injury cases, a big part of our job is setting up the structure to protect and administer the money we recover for the injured person. When we see that there is a possibility of adequate financial recovery, we bring in a guardianship and special needs trust specialist early on at no additional cost to the client to make sure that everything is set up right from the beginning. Now we are close to both Shepherd and Emory. If a family member has had a traumatic brain injury, give us a call. I would be happy to meet with you either here or at your home or at either hospital so you don’t have to leave your loved ones side. I look forward to talking with you.

On May 22, 2018, former State Bar of Georgia president Ken Shigley will be a candidate for election to the Georgia Court of Appeals. The only other candidate is Ken Hodges, a former Dougherty County District Attorney. Ken Hodges was the Democratic Party nominee for Attorney General in 2010.