Sorry to hear about your job SmilinEyes (good name!). Fortunately I live in the UK where it's harder to sack people (for now) - they couldn't have gotten rid of me in 3 days even if they wanted to.

Unfortunately I seem to have reached the point where it's gone above my immediate manager to higher people who are businessmen rather than healthcare professionals and see the US model as something to aspire to so I'll have to see what happens.

I had the same worries as you and I thought I was over them - I'd got to a position where I could get back on the ward, run group sessions (I'm an OT), join or even lead meetings and do all the other cognitively demanding parts of the job without too many problems.

Unfortunately I was still physically very vulnerable to being hit or jolted, which was in the end what happened. I was pretending to the patients that I had completely recovered, on the grounds that I didn't want my head to be targeted if one of them became aggressive.

Unfortunately this led to the opposite problem, friendly over-tactile behaviour which jolted me around anyway. If the guy who had done it had known the effect it would have had he wouldn't have done it - but that could have left me open to something worse further down the line....

I now don't know what to do, because the kind of work I've done has always been with people who are potentially aggressive, excitable or both. I was good at it, and good at communicating with these sorts of people who had these problems.

My workplace now don't want me to come back to work even if I recover this month as they're worried if I get knocked again they could be liable. They want a doctor to tell them that I'm safe to come back but I suspect that even after then end of the month I'll still be vulnerable to knocks - so will they find me some sort of admin job, try sack me or what? I don't know.
At the moment I feel that like you I love this sort of work, but to be honest any sort of job I can reliably do would work for me for the time being.

Before I hit my head we were planning to emigrate to Australia in the autumn - this might need to be delayed as it might be more than I can handle, but on the other there are a lot of OT jobs out there and it might be a good opportunity for me to move on to another sort of job, maybe another sort of client group or even a physical health job - I'd have to wear a pay cut as it's not my area of knowledge but at least I could earn regular money without worrying about being hit.

I'm still getting my head around it as this latest setback only happened last week, but I suspect that as with so much else since my concussion this may be an area in which I have to reduce my expectations, for the time being at least.

Try not to get too worried about it - if you're good in that sort of high pressure, high stress environment that means you're good at listening and communicating with people full stop, as well as managing all sorts of difficult situations - if you need to work in a different area of healthcare you'll find new challenges and also that a lot of your skills are still useful, and I'm sure you would still be great at your job and find things to love about it.

Good luck with the vestibular therapy - I'm glad that's one problem I haven't had, my friend got it with a PCS a few years ago, said he constantly felt like he was going to puke or fall down stairs! Must be awful. Good luck with everything else too, hope you make it back to where you want to be