When considering the type of injury that you would have to sustain to lose your sense of vision, people often assume that the eyes themselves have to be affected. They think about things like being injured in a fire, for instance, or burned by dangerous chemicals.
But what if your injury is actually to your brain? Perhaps you were involved in a severe car accident and suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI), or maybe you fell from a ladder at work and hit your head on the concrete floor. Could an injury to your brain actually be what leads to permanent blindness?
Cerebral blindness is one potential outcome
This certainly can happen, and it is called cerebral blindness when it does. As some medical experts have put it, those who suffer serious head injuries “often have multiple and extensive intracranial lesions that may involve the optic pathways and result in various homonymous visual field defects or bilateral visual loss.”
You’ll note above that they say that this often happens, but not that it always does. This is just the nature of brain injuries, as they are all unique. The exact symptoms that a person experiences depend on what part of the brain is injured, how severe that injury is, how quickly they get medical treatment and a whole host of other factors. Two people can have brain injuries that appear the same from the outside, but that have drastically different impacts on their lives. If the right areas of the brain have been damaged in your incident, then it could interfere with these optic pathways and that is what could lead to reduced vision or complete blindness.
If you have suffered a severe injury or disability like this, it’s very important for you to understand all of your potential options to seek financial compensation.