What are some symptoms of mild traumatic brain injury (in this case sustained by a fall), and how would you go about treating it, and for how long? The more detail, the better.
I got a concussion in March of last year when a teenager decided traffic lights didn't apply to him and slammed into the side of my car. Here's what I can tell you about it:
1. I lost several seconds worth of memory, from the time when the light turned green and I entered the intersection, to sitting in my stopped car trying to figure out what had just hit me in the head (the airbag). I also lost my hearing on that side of my head for a minute or two. In the hospital, after I'd been transported and was lying on a backboard all by myself in some little room off the ER, the entire left side of my body started twitching and shaking uncontrollably for several minutes. It had stopped by the time the nurse came back in, and though I mentioned it, no one seemed to care.
2. I had a constant headache for 10 1/2 months. Sometimes it was migraine intensity, sometimes it was just angry background static, but it never let up in all that time. Not even vicodin could do more than just take the edge off it. Frequently I would have problems focusing my eyes, particularly if I needed to focus on anything for more than a few moments. Reading was almost impossible for months, and even now I find I have to read books in short stints with breaks.
3. For the first few days, I was loopy as all hell. My sense of the passage of time was practically non-existent, and is still a bit wonky.
4. For several months, I had little bits of memory go missing at random. At first I thought I was having tiny blackouts, but eventually I decided that there wasn't any sort of loss of physical control or consciousness during these episodes, just a failure for some small bit of time to get recorded in the brain-log. These were, however, extremely disorienting and scary. At the peak I was having thirty or forty of these episodes a day.
5. There was substantial disruption to my physical memory. Tasks I didn't even think about anymore -- typing my password, dialing my parent's phone number, flipping omelets -- I had to stop and think through step by step. Vestiges of this remain, 16 months after the accident, and I have had to teach myself to be in a state of heightened mindfulness to get through any extended, complex physical tasks.
6. There are entire memories gone. For example, my favorite ever series, which I've read several times, I couldn't even vaguely tell you the plot of anymore. A new book came out last fall, and I haven't read it yet, because I have realized I have to go back and reread all the others first, and that's really depressing. People's names. There are vacations I took that I can't remember any real details of anymore. It's jarring when I run across something I should remember well and it's just gone or some blurry little indistinct turd left in my mind.
7. Likewise, my ability to self-organize is still severely impaired. A lifetime of self-taught coping mechanisms for being ADD has helped me here, but has not been sufficient. I have to write more stuff down, and can't rely on my memory for organizational things (appointments, shopping lists, etc.) at all anymore.
8. I had, and still have, word loss and a good amount of homonym confusion (won vs. one, etc.)
9. I also had difficulty with strong emotions, and was much easier to become angry, upset, sad, etc. This is still somewhat true.
10. I am now very prone to bad headaches, even though the Headache from Hell is gone. I never used to get headaches unless I was getting sick, but I now have two or three a week bad enough to require meds to function on. I also tire more easily, and when I'm tired, the remaining symptoms are exacerbated (clumsiness, word swapping, dropping words, forgetfulness, etc.)
11. I feel like I've become stupider than I used to be.
And, ah, that's been my mild traumatic brain injury so far. Treatment was time, rest, instructions to "not think so much", and drugs to damp down the headache.
Hope that helps.