Identify traumatic brain injury and temporary personality or behavioral change?
Instructions
The last thing Conner remembers is leaving a bar with some friends after watching the Super Bowl together.
“I know we were drinking,” he says. “But I don’t remember who won. Is it over?”
“What else do you remember?” the nurse asks him.
“Waking up here. That’s it.”
He looks around his hospital room. He has a broken leg, three broken ribs, a black eye, and a head wound. He tries to touch his eye when he sees that his hand is bandaged.
“What happened to me?” he says. “How’d I get here?”
Two police officers pay Conner a visit. When he’s unable to recall anything about his accident, they tell him he was indeed at a bar with friends, but when the game was over, another guy jumped him as he and his friends left the bar.
Later, Conner’s friends visit and he asks them, “What happened, guys? Tell me everything.”
As they start to talk, he snaps at them to stop talking so fast.
Later, his parents and girlfriend stop by, and he tells them to leave as well. They are shaken because normally Conner is very close to all three of them and is typically easygoing. But they leave when he insists.
The next day, two of his friends return.
“Okay, what happened?” he says. “I’m calm now.”
“Our team won!” Doug smiles.
“The Super Bowl?”
“Yup!”
“All right!”
Neither friend speaks.
“Soooo…” says Conner. “Come on. How’d I get in here with all this?” He indicates the tubes, the monitors, the leg cast, and bandages.
“First, what do you remember?” Doug says.
“Being at the bar. I remember beer and the nachos. Cute waitress. You bums…and that’s it.”
“You don’t remember we won?”
“Nope.”
“Or cheering?”
“Nope.”
“Or leaving,” Bill interjects.
“Nothing,” Conner shakes his head.
His friends glance at each other. “Okay,” Doug says, “Here goes. We won and we were cheering, and some guys at the bar turned and glared at us.”
“They were a lot drunker than we were,” Bill says, “plus, yeah, their team lost.”
“So,” Doug says, “we thought maybe we’d just get out of there, go back to my place, maybe. This sound familiar?”
Conner shakes his head.
“We no sooner stepped out in the parking lot than they came out behind us. They leaped on you just because you’re the biggest. The first guy knocked you down and then we started to pull you up, but we were outnumbered.”
Doug and Bill are shaken. Doug’s chin trembles. “We let you down. There were just so many of them.”
“It’s okay,” Conner says. “You can’t help that.” After a pause, he nods. “So then what happened?”
“The cops came almost right away. Super Bowl Sunday. I guess they were prepared.”
Conner nods, and the three are silent for a while.
“So how much of that do you remember?” Bill says quietly.
“Those nachos,” he says. Then he smiles up at them. “And the cute waitress.”
Conner continues to be short-tempered with his family and friends, even though he is very understanding about his friends’ inability to protect him. He is diagnosed with traumatic brain injury from numerous kicks to his head. He eventually recovers, but with some minor cognitive impairments that he is able to compensate for. Eventually, he can return to his job as an account executive, but he never is able to recall his attack or his attackers. Identify at least one symptom from each of the key overarching categories of TBI symptoms.
What might explain his temporary personality or behavioral change?
In addition to medical treatment, what might help Conner with his moments of agitation or other latent emotional reactions to his attack and injuries
Answer preview:
Words: 292