MetaFilter posts tagged with brain and injury

The man in your picture is almost unrecognizable

cashman — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 13:03:21 -0800

Former all pro NFL running back, 38 year old Priest Holmes feels that all NFL players suffer from the violence of the game, but believes running backs are at an increased risk if they average dozens of carries a game for years at a time. Holmes recalled how hits changed the color of the sky. Another former NFL running back, 32 year old Jamal Lewis talked about his memory losses and head trauma. Both men could encounter the cognitive decline lesser known former Chargers running back 45 year old Steve Hendrickson has experienced. There are now 99 concussion-related lawsuits, which include more than 2,600 former players.

A Belgian man diagnosed as being in a coma for 23 years was actually conscious the whole time.

njbradburn — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 04:33:30 -0800

"I shall never forget the day when they discovered what was truly wrong with me – it was my second birth. Rom Houbens was simply paralysed and had no way to let doctors caring for him what he was suffering. Only the re-evaluation of his case at the University of Liege brought to light that Houben was only paralysed all these years. Hi-tech scans showed his brain was still functioning almost completely normally.

Natasha Richardson Dead at Age 45 From Fall at Ski Resort

WCityMike — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 01:06:48 -0800

Actress Natasha Richardson died yesterday at the age of 45 after a fall while taking a beginner's lesson at the Mont Tremblant Ski Resort, located 80 miles northwest of Montreal in Quebec, Canada. After starring with Liam Neeson in the 1994 Jodie Foster film "Nell," she married him later that year and would later have two sons, Micheal and Daniel. Richardson was born into a family with a very long history of actors and actresses. Her grandfather was Michael Redgrave, and Michael's daughter Vanessa married director Tony Richardson, a union that brought about Natasha and her sister, actress Joely Richardson (best known to some as Julia in Nip/Tuck). (Natasha's aunt is actress Lynn Redgrave.) Her father, who had a "quiet–if not completely closeted–gay life", died of AIDS at age 63; his wife Vanessa made large contributions to AIDS-related charities, and Richardson became very active organizing and planning fundraisers and other related work for amFAR. An hour after the fall, Ms. Richardson reported she was "not feeling well," and was taken first to a local hospital, then to Montreal's Hopital du Sacre-Coeur, then to NYC's Lenox Hill Hospital, where she passed away. Richardson began her career as a four-year-old flower girl in her father's 1968 film "The Charge of the Light Brigade", and acted throughout her adolescence, breaking into larger-scale starring roles as Mary Shelley and Patty Hearst, as well as the starring role of Kate in "The Handmaid's Tale." She became known to the Disney-watching crowd as the "nasty wife" in the Lindsey Lohan "Parent Trap" remake, as well as a role in Jennifer Lopez's film, "Maid in Manhattan". Richardson has been said to have had "talk and die syndrome," but this is simply a referral to "the fact that we always worry about people with head injuries that don't show up immediately, which is why we like to observe people after a head injury for 24 hours." Scientific American's interview with the chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center indicates that she may have had an arterial dissection in a blood vessel in the brain, possibly leading to a brain stem stroke; an epidural hematoma; or an arteriovenous malformation. While it may be entirely unrelated to the nature of Ms. Richardson's injury, Iraq war veterans have been having similar yet non-fatal experiences where they walk away fine from a brain injury only to feel the effects at a later point. This was covered in Popular Science's August 2008 issue, in a story called "Shock to the System." In it, neuroscientist Ibolja Cernak [...] "believes that blasts may do more than just rattle the head; the shock waves also compress the torso, which may cause pressure waves to ripple through blood vessels like miniature tsunamis, rushing into the brain and damaging tissue." One wonders whether the testing gadget used to monitor for brain trauma might be adapted in the future to civilian use in sports with possible risk of brain injury such as skiing, boxing, etc., in order to prevent the kind of circumstances that may have caused Ms. Richardson's death.

The head is not a percussion instrument

orthogonality — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 15:33:31 -0800

"Several songs on the instrumental album were voted Best in Genre, and then shortly after that I was flown out to Los Angeles and nominated Independent Artist of the Year by the Association of Independent Artists." Until age 40, he'd never played piano. Then he suffered a concussion.. Also, cavemen sang -- and maybe echo-located. Where? Where they painted their cave art.

Sgt. Wells's New Skull

srboisvert — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 01:25:58 -0800

Sgt. Wells's New Skull. In the epidemic of brain injuries coming out of the war, Army neurosurgeons had never seen someone survive such a devastating wound. But Brian Wells jokes that he just left part of his head in Iraq. Someday, he says, he'll have to go back and get it.