Delayed Symptoms to Watch For Following A Car Accident
If you’ve been in a car accident, you should always seek immediate medical attention. There’s a good reason for this!
During an accident, your body is flooded with adrenaline, the fight-or-flight response to a stressful situation. Adrenaline gives you a boost of energy, but it can also mask pain and other signs of injuries. This is why you should seek medical treatment even if you don’t feel hurt.
In other cases, symptoms simply don’t reach their peak until a few days after a crash. For many kinds of soft tissue injuries, it takes a few days for your body’s inflammatory response to start causing more significant pain. You might think you can just “sleep it off,” but often these conditions get worse without treatment, not better.
In a motor vehicle collision, the sudden impact can cause your head to snap forward, which can cause serious damage to the brain, the neck and shoulders, and the spinal cord. These may not be immediately apparent injuries, so in the days and weeks after a car accident you should watch for these injury symptoms:
- Headaches: These can be signs of a brain bleed or traumatic brain injury that may take days or weeks to start showing symptoms.
- Neck pain: This and other soft tissue injuries are common whiplash symptoms. When your head snaps around, your neck bears a lot of the stress. Sprains and strains are common in the neck area, but may take hours or days to appear. You may have even suffered a damaged or herniated cervical disc.
- Back pain: Similar to neck pain, spinal cord injuries such as slipped discs and nerve damage are caused by spinal compression during car accidents. Common symptoms are dull aches, sharp pains, stiffness, and numbness or tingling.
- Abdominal pain: Your seatbelt may have saved your life, but it also may have impacted your organs in a way that causes internal bleeding. If you experience pain, swelling, lightheadedness, or dizziness, you should immediately seek medical attention.
- Blurred Vision or Dizziness: These concussion head injury symptoms, along with confusion, nausea and sensitivity to light, can take hours to appear in car accident victims. Concussions can vary widely in severity, but it will take a doctor visit to know for sure.
- Cognitive or Emotional Changes: Traumatic brain injuries can cause changes to a person’s cognitive function, mood, behavior, and emotional regulation. Becoming easily irritated or frustrated, confusion and memory problems, and personality changes are all possible symptoms of brain injuries. You yourself may not even notice them; it may take close family or friends to realize that your behavior is different following the car crash.
- Anxiety, Depression, Nightmares, Flashbacks: After traumatic events like car accidents, you might feel fear when you think of getting back behind the wheel, or you might avoid driving near where you had an accident. These are signs that you are affected by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and it may takes days or weeks to realize the full extent of this debilitating mental health disorder.
Even if you were cleared by a doctor when you were involved in a car accident, you should continue to monitor any aches and pains that appear. Some of the injury symptoms can lead to chronic pain and ongoing medical treatment. If you are filing an insurance claim, these injuries can have a big impact on the amount of damages you are claiming.
What To Do About Delayed Onset Injuries
Delayed symptoms of car accident injuries can be very serious. In some cases, you may even be experiencing delayed injuries, such as damage to internal organs that gets worse over time. These can become life-threatening situations, even weeks after the car accident.
If you experience any of these delayed injury symptoms, you should seek prompt medical attention. A medical professional can help rule out a severe injury, and provide the immediate help you need. If you have any new symptoms or changes, you should discuss them with your doctor as soon as possible. You should also follow their treatment plan as closely as possible.
By doing so, you help establish that your injuries are caused by the auto accident. If it’s been too long after a car accident, it becomes harder link your injury to the accident, which gives insurance companies enough doubt to deny your claim. Also, if someone has a soft tissue injury as a result of a car accident, but then goes on to lift something heavy which further tears or strains the muscle, the insurance company may try to argue that they should not receive compensation for their injury. This is why it’s important to follow your doctor’s directions.
If you’ve been the victim of another driver’s negligence, you may file an insurance claim against the at-fault driver’s insurance company. The insurance company, however, may aggressively argue that your delayed injuries are not as bad as you say, or not related to the car crash.
If you are in this situation, you need a skilled car accident lawyer to help you build a strong case. In many cases, the only way to convince an insurer to pay a fair settlement is by filing an personal injury lawsuit against them.
Talk To An Experienced Car Accident Lawyer
A good personal injury lawyer will tell you that the more documentation you have to show your injuries, the better. A great personal injury lawyer will be able to connect you with medical experts and specialists that can help show your injuries are due to the car accident, and help strengthen your claim.
Powell and Pisman Injury Lawyers work closely with doctors and specialists throughout Chicago and Illinois who can help you recover from your auto accident injuries, even long after a car crash. We take great pride in not only providing exceptional legal services, but also in connecting our clients with the medical professionals they need to make the best possible medical recovery, too.
Our lawyers are also skilled at arguing with insurance companies, who want to pay you as little as possible. With our help, you can present a strong personal injury claim to get you fair compensation, even with delayed car accident symptoms.
Car accident injuries can be expensive, stressful, and life-changing. You deserve the best care, without worrying about the financial side of recovery.
Call Powell and Pisman Injury Lawyers For Help with Your Car Accident Settlement
Not all car accidents cause immediate pain. However, when other injury symptoms take time to show up, it can be difficult to link them to the motor vehicle accident and get the settlement you deserve.
If you are experiencing delayed injury symptoms following a traumatic event like a car accident, such as neck pain or headaches, don’t delay. Talk to a doctor, then call Powell and Pisman Injury Lawyers for a free consultation about your legal case. To schedule your free case review, call us at (312) 701-3333 or complete our online contact form .
The content provided here is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal advice on any subject.
