How often have you encountered a professional, whether it’s a doctor, nurse, or therapist, and had no idea what they were talking about? You find yourself thrown in with all these people that seem to be speaking another language.
Diffuse Axonal Injury
Parietal Lobe
Craniotomy
Aphasia
I like to call it the “fancy talk”. Sometimes I think we throw those words at you so we can feel like we remember at least a couple of things from college, however, it is often at the expense of helping you have a better understanding of what happened to you or your loved one. I feel like this is a topic that we can stretch over several posts, so let’s just start with one of the basics: the two hemispheres of the brain.
Seems simple enough.
I want to highlight a few major points.
1. Each hemisphere of the brain is in control of the OPPOSITE side of the body. You read that right (no pun intended). The “fancy talk” term is contralateral control, which really just means that if you get hurt on the right side of your brain, the left side of your body is typically affected, and vice versa. For example, after having a stroke on the right side of your brain, you may have weakness or lack of movement in your left arm and leg.
2. They talk to each other all the time – the corpus callosum (fibers in between and connecting the right and left hemisphere) send thousands of messages to each other every second.
3. They have different responsibilities. The right side of our brain is typically given credit for our “creativity” and is considered more “holistic and spatial”, processing music, art, faces, and shapes (Brain Injury Association of America, 2019). I think of it as our “hippy” side. If it were a person it would be wearing bell-bottom jeans and have flowers in its hair. The left side of our brain is more “logical”, responsible for processing language and calculations and keeping us organized (Brain Injury Association of America, 2019). It would probably be the person scolding you for being a minute late for work and wear a suit and tie even on the weekends.
There are TONS of more in-depth lists describing what each side is responsible for, here are just a few:
What happens when they’re hurt? Well, as I’m sure you have heard time and time again:
No two brain injuries are the same.
However, we are often able to see some similarities when a certain hemisphere is injured.
For right-sided injuries:
- Left side inattention or possible visual neglect
- Difficulty with abstract thought
- Decreased self-awareness into physical and cognitive difficulties related to their injury
For left-sided injuries:
- Difficulty understanding language
- Difficulty with verbal expression including word finding and word formation
- Impaired sequencing and logic
Regardless of the injury, as a person with a brain injury or a caregiver, researching some of the characteristics related to the hemisphere that was affected is a good place to start. Knowing the right questions to ask can be difficult and overwhelming. To avoid information overload, try starting with:
“What side or hemisphere is the injury on?”
Once you have your answer, your research can start off in the right direction. Brain injury is scary enough without remaining uninformed.
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