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 so in low-cal of how you lot are presently functioning.

  • Have you been in an accident recently, say, within the last year?
  • Did you hit your head? Were yous shaken, or did you feel a physical affect?
  • Were you taken to the hospital?
  • What was your diagnosis?
  • What doctors are you currently seeing?
  • Were x-rays, MRI, or CT scan taken? SPECT scan?
  • What medications are you currently taking? Were you given a prescription for this event?

Please read this list and point whatever problems you may exist having. Remember to distinguish and observe if you had the problem or condition before the accident when evaluating if you have the condition presently. Notation if information technology fabricated a pre-existing issue worse.

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

Hurting

  • Do you have more headaches since your injury? Pain in the temples or forehead?
  • Do y'all have pain in the back of your head? Does it move forrad? Are there moments of very sharp or stabbing pain that lasts for a few moments?
  • Practise you lot tire more easily, either mentally or physically? Does fatigue worsen with pressured thinking or emotional situations?
  • Are your neck and shoulders kickoff to hurt? Tingling down your arms? Overall aching feeling? Overall pain upon waking in the morn?
  • Are y'all overly sensitive to light, sound, motility, or intense environments? Do y'all have dark spots before you eyes or blurred vision? Does it go worse with fatigue?

Memory

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

Attention and Concentration

  • Are yous having trouble concentrating? Belongings a thought?
  • Do you have difficulty concentrating in noisy or strongly lit environments?
  • Do you have difficulty concentrating on more than one topic or task at a time?
  • Do you have difficulty focusing your attention while reading or watching Goggle box?
  • Are you lot having difficulty staying focused when you are driving?
  • Do you accept difficulty making decisions? Or remembering what you decided?
  • Do you migrate off in chat, unable to recall what has been said?
  • Is information technology stressful to read and answer this questionnaire?
  • Are you easily distracted? When interrupted, exercise you struggle to observe your place again or return to your job?
  • Have you become impulsive, making decisions or remarks without thinking them through? Unintentionally hurting someone'due south feelings? Impulse shopping?

Language and Communication

  • Do you have difficulty following a conversation?
  • Do you lot have difficulty thinking of the verbal word or words you want to apply?
  • Practise y'all have bug expressing yourself in writing?
  • Is information technology hard conversing with others or staying in a conversation?
  • Are you struggling to spell words? Do you reverse the letters?
  • Are you pronouncing words correctly? Is your tongue twisting words around or relocating words inaccurately in a judgement?

Visual Perception

  • Exercise you lot have increased sensitivity to calorie-free, sound, shopping, party, or large meeting environments?
  • Do objects seem closer or farther away than they actually are?
  • When reading, do printed letters appear to change their shape or position on the page? Are yous experiencing eye strain or headaches when reading?
  • Do you lot take difficulty focusing your eyes on objects?
  • Do you lot feel light-headed or nauseous? Are you bumping into objects more than than usual? Whacking your elbows, striking your head, or stubbing your toes frequently?
  • Exercise your eyes struggle to runway written text or follow moving objects?

Executive Function

  • Exercise you have difficulty following through with planning for work or leisure activities? Practice you accurately gauge the fourth dimension a job will accept?
  • Do you take bug setting goals and priorities and keeping to your plan?
  • Do you lot take difficulty starting new tasks? Does a new task trigger depression, hopelessness or fatigue? Practise you struggle to get in the mood to begin?
  • Practice yous have difficulty monitoring and correcting your errors?
  • Practise you accept difficulty irresolute from i job to another?
  • Are you lot able to anticipate the consequences of your actions? Can you foresee outcomes or project the future of a chore.
  • Are you checking and rechecking your piece of work? Does the slightest disruption in your routine derail you?
  • Are you unintentionally repeating yourself in chat?

Emotional Function

  • Have you noticed frequent mood swings or emotional outbursts?
  • Do y'all take difficulty handling your anger?
  • Practise y'all experience depressed? Are you fearful? Take you lot lost hope? Are y'all tired of fighting for recovery? But want your life back the way it was?
  • Practise you have feelings of anxiety, jumpiness, or nervousness?
  • Do family and friends comment on changes in your behavior? Are people living around you on the outskirts of yous?
  • Trouble sleeping? Poor appetite or binge eating? Craving stimulant foods?
  • Exercise you feel hopeless, although you tin identify things that are hopeful or positive? Does hope feel just out of your reach?
  • Have y'all become gullible? Easily distractible or unintentionally naïve? Tin can you tell when y'all are beingness teased, and do you respond with humor?
  • Are you lot hands startled, agitated, or irritated? Do you respond with aggression? Feel tense or wound upward all the fourth dimension? Overly sensitive to your environment?

Finances and Measurements

  • Do you have difficulty hands performing simple addition and subtraction?
  • Can you easily make change at the store?
  • Practise you struggle to remainder your checkbook as accurately equally before?
  • Do you call up to open up your postal service, sort it, and pay your bills on time?
  • Can you follow a recipe easily, or encompass and follow instructions to assemble or operate something? Tin can yous easily follow a map or directions to a location?

Organization and Sequencing

  • Do yous have difficulty post-obit the steps of a recipe?
  • Do you attend to your post on a regular basis? Can you accurately sort the junk mail and focus on mail worthy of your fourth dimension and free energy?
  • Do you struggle with performing, initiating, or keeping up with normal, routine household chores?
  • Do you accept difficulty performing more than 1 household job at a fourth dimension?
  • Can yous effectively manage your fourth dimension? Practise you lose track of time?
  • Do you gear up priorities and fulfill your obligations?
  • Do you follow through on a project to the stop, or do yous set it aside with good intentions, yet ultimately abandon it?

Prophylactic

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

Lifestyle

Other quick questions y'all may relate to include: (Answering: Never, Occasionally, Sometimes, Oft, and Always)

  • Remembering where your keys, spectacles, purse, wallet are?
  • Remembering to brush your teeth, eat breakfast, and shower?
  • Remembering how to exercise all the parts of your chore?
  • Do you lose track of time? Forget to eat? Forget who yous just dialed on the phone?
  • Are you sleeping well? Are you lot easily fatigued?
  • Do yous experience overwhelmed, or unable to cope?
  • Are you intolerant of noise? Even traffic dissonance? Even the dishwasher?
  • To have a successful conversation, must you turn off the radio or TV first?
  • Are you restless? Do you worry more? Lack patience?
  • Are you lot overwhelmed past elementary pleasures, or by people yous used to relish?
  • Do you feel like you are "losing it?" Out of control? Going crazy?
  • Practise yous hopelessly search for the discussion you want?
  • Is your oral communication slurred or jumbled? Are you inventing words that get jammed into each other?
  • Is your body'southward temperature in control? Your appetite?
  • Are in that location changes in your sex bulldoze or sexual response? Is orgasm a struggle?
  • Are there changes to your catamenia? Your sleep cycle? Digestive rhythm?

Likely, you see yourself in these questions. Somehow, your brain and emotional functions are different than they were before your incident. You need to know that y'all are not alone, and y'all are not crazy. There are actions you tin can take to heighten your mending process and to maximize your brain's 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 L. Denton, PhD. Demos Medical Publishing, 2008. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. www.demosmedpub.com.