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Preventing Head Injuries
Protect Your Child from Traumatic Brain Injury
By Teri Brown
Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is a term scary enough to strike fear into the heart of any parent, and for good reason. The term is broad enough to include conditions ranging from concussions, which are frightening but generally not life threatening, to the type of injury that leaves your child altered for the rest of his life.
Ellen Westlein, mother of three from Newport News, Va., remembers the terror she felt when she realized there was something wrong with her daughter after falling off the kitchen table.
"Don't ask me what she was doing on the kitchen table; I still have no idea how she got there," Westlein says. "A few minutes later, she threw up. I knew enough to know that was bad news, so I rushed her to the ER."
They did a CAT scan and she was diagnosed with a mild concussion. Westlein was relieved that it was mild, but she can never forget how she felt during that time. She is also more cautious than she was before.
"Because she's had a head injury, even a minor one, I have to keep a closer eye on her than I would if she had never had an injury," Westlein says.
Fortunately, Westlien's daughter only had mild TBI, but because injury to the brain can have such long-lasting effects, it is actually one of the most costly of all unintentional diagnoses and puts a serious strain on the nation's health care resources. TBI often requires a multidisciplinary response from a variety of health care providers, such as neurologists, neurosurgeons and physical therapists, and the cost of recovery or long-term care is prohibitive. TBI (except for shaken baby syndrome) is almost always unintentional and therefore, oftentimes preventable.
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