Sure, with pleasure.
When you have a brain injury, whether it comes about through illness, if there's a brain tumour, if there's a space-occupying lesion, depending on what area is affected.... It could be that a certain area is affected because of, as I said, some sort of an illness, an infection, or a tumour, or there could have been an accident. If you're in a car accident and you have actual trauma to the head, or you have a gunshot wound or something that's not illness, that's what we usually consider traumatic.
You can have the same outcomes though. It doesn't matter the method of the brain injury. What's important is where the injury is and whether it is stable or it's progressing.
The brain is very interesting. Depending on where the injury or the illness was, there are different effects. Some of our brain injury patients can have memory problems. Some of them are aggressive. We have four beds that are actually in an area of our unit that we're able to lock, because they just cannot control their aggressivity. There are other patients who, if we left them alone, would just sit in a chair all day. They wouldn't get up. They wouldn't eat. They wouldn't get out of bed. We have to stimulate them.
It depends on what area is involved, and it also depends on whether the injury is progressive or static. These are the symptoms.
With all of our patients we always do an assessment. We see what the deficits are and then we determine what we have to work on.