Do I Have a Brain Injury? Symptom Discovery Quiz

Gail Denton, PhD, Demos Medical Publishing

BrainLash: Questionnaire

This questionnaire will help focus your symptom discovery for brain injury. When answering these questions, do and then in calorie-free of how you are before long functioning.

  • Have you been in an accident recently, say, within the terminal year?
  • Did you hit your head? Were you shaken, or did you experience a physical touch on?
  • Were y'all taken to the hospital?
  • What was your diagnosis?
  • What doctors are yous currently seeing?
  • Were x-rays, MRI, or CT scan taken? SPECT scan?
  • What medications are y'all currently taking? Were you lot given a prescription for this issue?

Delight read this listing and signal any problems you may be having. Think to distinguish and find if you had the problem or condition before the accident when evaluating if yous have the condition before long. Note if it fabricated a pre-existing issue worse.

Charge per unit your problems on the post-obit scale: Never, Occasionally, Sometimes, Oftentimes, or Always.

Pain

  • Practise yous have more headaches since your injury? Pain in the temples or forehead?
  • Do you have pain in the back of your head? Does information technology movement forward? Are at that place moments of very sharp or stabbing pain that lasts for a few moments?
  • Do you tire more easily, either mentally or physically? Does fatigue worsen with pressured thinking or emotional situations?
  • Are your neck and shoulders beginning to hurt? Tingling down your artillery? Overall aching feeling? Overall pain upon waking in the morning?
  • Are you overly sensitive to calorie-free, sound, motility, or intense environments? Do yous accept nighttime spots before you lot eyes or blurred vision? Does it get worse with fatigue?

Retentiveness

  • Do you lose or misplace items?
  • Do you forget what people tell yous? Or what yous have said to others?
  • Do you forget where yous parked your machine? Or your current driving destination?
  • Practice you lot forget what you've read? Or the last Tv or radio topic?
  • Are you lot having difficulty remembering life details from the past?

Attention and Concentration

  • Are you having trouble concentrating? Holding a idea?
  • Do you have difficulty concentrating in noisy or strongly lit environments?
  • Exercise you have difficulty concentrating on more than ane topic or task at a time?
  • Do you take difficulty focusing your attention while reading or watching TV?
  • Are you having difficulty staying focused when you are driving?
  • Do you accept difficulty making decisions? Or remembering what you decided?
  • Do yous migrate off in chat, unable to recall what has been said?
  • Is it stressful to read and answer this questionnaire?
  • Are you lot easily distracted? When interrupted, practice you struggle to find your place once again or return to your task?
  • Take you become impulsive, making decisions or remarks without thinking them through? Unintentionally pain someone'due south feelings? Impulse shopping?

Linguistic communication and Advice

  • Do you accept difficulty following a conversation?
  • Practice you lot have difficulty thinking of the verbal discussion or words yous want to use?
  • Exercise you accept problems expressing yourself in writing?
  • Is it difficult conversing with others or staying in a conversation?
  • Are you struggling to spell words? Exercise you contrary the letters?
  • Are yous pronouncing words correctly? Is your tongue twisting words effectually or relocating words inaccurately in a sentence?

Visual Perception

  • Exercise you take increased sensitivity to light, sound, shopping, political party, or big meeting environments?
  • Exercise objects seem closer or farther abroad than they actually are?
  • When reading, practise printed letters announced to change their shape or position on the page? Are you experiencing eye strain or headaches when reading?
  • Exercise you take difficulty focusing your eyes on objects?
  • Do you feel silly or nauseous? Are you bumping into objects more than usual? Whacking your elbows, hitting your head, or stubbing your toes frequently?
  • Do your optics struggle to runway written text or follow moving objects?

Executive Function

  • Practise y'all accept difficulty post-obit through with planning for piece of work or leisure activities? Exercise you accurately gauge the time a chore will take?
  • Do you have problems setting goals and priorities and keeping to your plan?
  • Do you have difficulty starting new tasks? Does a new task trigger low, hopelessness or fatigue? Practise you struggle to make it the mood to brainstorm?
  • Practise yous have difficulty monitoring and correcting your errors?
  • Practice you have difficulty irresolute from 1 task to another?
  • Are you lot able to anticipate the consequences of your actions? Can y'all foresee outcomes or project the future of a chore.
  • Are you checking and rechecking your work? Does the slightest disruption in your routine derail you?
  • Are you unintentionally repeating yourself in conversation?

Emotional Function

  • Have you noticed frequent mood swings or emotional outbursts?
  • Do you have difficulty treatment your anger?
  • Practise y'all experience depressed? Are yous fearful? Have you lot lost hope? Are y'all tired of fighting for recovery? Just desire your life back the way it was?
  • Do you have feelings of anxiety, jumpiness, or nervousness?
  • Practice family unit and friends comment on changes in your beliefs? Are people living around you on the outskirts of you?
  • Trouble sleeping? Poor appetite or rampage eating? Craving stimulant foods?
  • Do you feel hopeless, although you can place things that are hopeful or positive? Does hope experience just out of your reach?
  • Accept y'all get gullible? Easily distractible or unintentionally naïve? Can yous tell when you are being teased, and do you respond with humor?
  • Are you easily startled, agitated, or irritated? Practice you answer with aggression? Feel tense or wound upwards all the time? Overly sensitive to your environment?

Finances and Measurements

  • Do you have difficulty easily performing simple addition and subtraction?
  • Tin you lot easily make change at the store?
  • Practice you struggle to balance your checkbook equally accurately as before?
  • Do you recall to open up your mail, sort information technology, and pay your bills on time?
  • Can you follow a recipe easily, or comprehend and follow instructions to get together or operate something? Tin can you easily follow a map or directions to a location?

Organization and Sequencing

  • Practice y'all have difficulty following the steps of a recipe?
  • Practise you lot attend to your mail on a regular ground? Can you accurately sort the junk mail and focus on postal service worthy of your time and energy?
  • Exercise yous struggle with performing, initiating, or keeping upwards with normal, routine household chores?
  • Do you lot have difficulty performing more than one household task at a time?
  • Tin yous effectively manage your time? Exercise you lot lose track of time?
  • Do you gear up priorities and fulfill your obligations?
  • Practice you follow through on a projection to the end, or practice you prepare it bated with adept intentions, yet ultimately abandon information technology?

Prophylactic

  • Exercise y'all forget to turn off the iron, stove, tea pot, or other household appliances?
  • Practice you forget where you are going when driving your car?
  • Practice y'all forget to lock your doors at home? Exercise yous lock your car doors? Garage door?
  • Do you lot forget of import appointments (east.g., picking upwardly the kids, going to your doctor's appointment, banking your paycheck)?
  • Do y'all experience like your condom awareness levels are less than they should be?
  • Has your tolerance for alcohol, caffeine, or drugs decreased?

Lifestyle

Other quick questions you may chronicle to include: (Answering: Never, Occasionally, Sometimes, Oft, and E'er)

  • Remembering where your keys, spectacles, pocketbook, wallet are?
  • Remembering to brush your teeth, eat breakfast, and shower?
  • Remembering how to do all the parts of your chore?
  • Do you lose runway of time? Forget to swallow? Forget who y'all just dialed on the phone?
  • Are you sleeping well? Are you hands fatigued?
  • Do you feel overwhelmed, or unable to cope?
  • Are y'all intolerant of racket? Even traffic dissonance? Even the dishwasher?
  • To have a successful chat, must you turn off the radio or Idiot box commencement?
  • Are you lot restless? Practise you worry more? Lack patience?
  • Are y'all overwhelmed by elementary pleasures, or by people you used to enjoy?
  • Practice you feel similar you are "losing it?" Out of control? Going crazy?
  • Do you hopelessly search for the word y'all desire?
  • Is your speech communication slurred or jumbled? Are you inventing words that get jammed into each other?
  • Is your torso's temperature in control? Your ambition?
  • Are there changes in your sex drive or sexual response? Is orgasm a struggle?
  • Are there changes to your flow? Your sleep cycle? Digestive rhythm?

Likely, y'all see yourself in these questions. Somehow, your encephalon and emotional functions are unlike than they were before your incident. You lot need to know that you are not alone, and you are not crazy. There are deportment you tin accept to enhance your mending process and to maximize your brain'south opportunity to recover and function to its highest potential.

Posted on BrainLine June 19, 2009.

From BrainLash: Maximize Your Recovery from Mild Brain Injury, Third Edition by Gail Fifty. Denton, PhD. Demos Medical Publishing, 2008. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. world wide web.demosmedpub.com.