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A concussion is a brain injury, not a bump on the head, and the dangerous cases are the ones that look mild at first. The window where a bleed can be caught and treated is measured in hours, which is why what happens in the emergency department matters as much as what happened at the moment of impact. Our Indianapolis brain injury attorneys at Christie Bell & Marshall handle claims where that window was missed.
Some symptoms call for emergency imaging instead of observation at home:
Any of these can indicate bleeding or swelling inside the skull. The stakes are not abstract: CDC figures put TBI deaths in the United States above 69,000 for 2021, attribute close to half of TBI hospitalizations to falls, and place older adults at the highest risk of being hospitalized or dying from one.
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The subtler signs are the reason concussions get dismissed. Headache, sensitivity to light and noise, sleep disruption, irritability, slowed thinking, and memory trouble frequently appear over the following days rather than at the scene, and people attribute them to stress or poor sleep.
Families usually notice before the injured person does. A partner reporting that someone has become short-tempered, forgetful, or unable to follow a conversation is describing a clinical finding, and it belongs in the medical record. This is the pattern seen in minor concussions, where the label mild refers to the classification, not the experience.
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Reasonable care after a head injury follows a recognizable sequence. A provider takes a history that includes the mechanism and any loss of consciousness, performs a neurological examination, and applies an accepted decision rule to determine whether imaging is needed. Risk factors such as age, anticoagulant use, repeated vomiting, or a deteriorating exam push firmly toward a CT scan.
Anticoagulation deserves particular attention. A patient on a blood thinner who strikes their head can bleed slowly and look well for hours, and that history alone should change the threshold for imaging and observation. Discharge instructions should be specific about what warrants an immediate return, and someone should be available to monitor the patient. Where that sequence breaks down, the result is frequently a misdiagnosis claim rather than a disputed diagnosis.
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Not every missed concussion is negligence. It becomes a claim when a provider departs from the accepted standard and that departure causes harm that timely care would have prevented. The patterns we investigate most often:
Where the failure happened in an emergency department, the claim frequently becomes an emergency room negligence matter, and the records that decide it are the triage notes, the imaging orders, and the nursing observations recorded over the hours before discharge.
A brain that has not recovered from one concussion is more vulnerable to the next. Returning an athlete to play, or a worker to a job with fall or impact risk, before symptoms resolve carries real danger, and a second injury during that window can produce catastrophic swelling.
Where a school, team physician, or employer disregarded a written restriction, responsibility can extend beyond the treating provider. Anyone weighing legal options after a concussion should preserve the clearance paperwork and the restriction that was issued, because those documents establish what was known and when.
A normal CT does not mean an uninjured brain. CT is designed to find bleeding and fractures, not the diffuse damage that produces lasting cognitive symptoms. Claims built on persistent deficits rely on neuropsychological testing that measures memory, attention, processing speed, and executive function against expected performance, supported by treating specialists and by people who knew the person before.
That evidence is what separates a documented injury from a disputed complaint, and gathering it is a large part of what a traumatic brain injury claim involves.
Two brain injury outcomes from this firm’s files: $5,250,000 for a woman who went without oxygen in a healthcare setting and sustained significant brain injury, and $1,250,000 where improper care resulted in a brain injury. The full record is on our case results page. Past results cannot guarantee what any individual case will produce, because every claim turns on its own facts.
Attorney Laura J. Conyers, RN spent more than a decade as a nurse in intensive care, coronary care, and hemodialysis units before entering practice, and reads these records with a clinician’s eye for what the chart shows and what it leaves out.
Concussion claims turn on documentation created in the first hours and on testing that has to be arranged deliberately. Neither happens on its own, and both get harder the longer a case sits.
Contact Christie Bell & Marshall to have the records looked at by people who read them for a living. The review costs nothing, and there is no fee unless we win.
Yes. Most concussions occur without any loss of consciousness, and its absence tells you little about severity. Persistent headache, confusion, memory trouble, or light sensitivity after a head impact justify evaluation regardless.
Many resolve within a few weeks, but a meaningful share persist for months. Symptoms that continue to escalate, or that are still interfering with work and daily function after several weeks, warrant a specialist referral instead of reassurance.
No. It becomes a claim only where the provider fell below the accepted standard and that failure caused harm timely care would have prevented. A missed bleed in a patient on a blood thinner with worsening symptoms is a much stronger case than a mild concussion that resolved on its own.
When you were treated. IC 34-18-7-1 measures the two years from the act or omission itself, not from the day symptoms appeared or a second doctor explained them. For a missed bleed that is usually days, but for a concussion mismanaged over weeks of follow-up the relevant date can be earlier than people assume. Claims arising from the crash itself rather than from medical care follow the general two-year injury deadline instead.
Emergency triage notes, the neurological exam, whether imaging was ordered and what it showed, the discharge instructions, and any record of a return visit. Neuropsychological testing carries the case where scans are normal but deficits persist.
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