Dealing With A Delayed Injury After Your Car Accident? Here's What You'll Need To Know

In many cases, a car accident can result in injuries that don't show up until days or even weeks after the collision took place. As a result, you might feel like you walked away unscathed, only to suffer debilitating pain and injury later on. Delayed injuries can have a serious impact on your efforts to receive fair compensation. The following takes a look at why delayed injuries occur, the symptoms to look for and how to protect yourself as you make your personal injury claim.

Why Delayed Injuries Happen

As it turns out, there's a good reason why delayed injuries happen and it has a lot to do with the body's fight-or-flight response. During such a response, the human body leaps into action by releasing a surge of endorphins and adrenaline. These chemicals perform two crucial functions during a typical fight-or-flight response:

• Adrenaline and endorphins provide the body with enough energy to carry out a fight-or-flight response. This often comes in the form of faster reflexes and increased strength for a few brief, yet crucial moments.
• Adrenaline and endorphins also block key pain receptors in the human brain, dulling its response to pain. This allows the body to exceed limits and endure injuries that normally wouldn't happen due to the pain.

As the effect of these chemicals wears off, you may start feeling all of the aches and pains that weren't felt during and immediately after the accident. As mentioned earlier, it can take several days or more for the pain from a sustained injury to set in.

Delayed Injury Symptoms

Concussions, bone fractures, and soft tissue injuries are the most common types of delayed injuries experienced by car accident victims. Common symptoms for concussions include nausea, constant headaches, dizziness, and blurred vision. Bone fractures are harder to detect without a proper X-ray, although certain fractures can cause pain in the affected area in some cases.

Soft tissue injuries caused by whiplash and other harsh movements during a crash are the hardest of all to detect, since the damage usually can't be detected by standard X-rays. A common symptom of soft tissue injury is swelling and stiffness at the site of the injury.

What Should You Do?

Delayed injury claims are often the hardest to fight for, since most plaintiffs wait until the onset of pain before seeking compensation. For this reason, it's absolutely important to have your physician examine you from head to toe soon after the accident occurs. This way, your doctor will be able to catch any injuries that might not seem painful now, but could prove debilitating later on.

In addition, you'll also have plenty of crucial documentation that establishes when and how your injuries happened. It's not unusual for insurance companies to argue that the injury occurred not as a result of the accident, but due to another, unrelated activity. With the examination from your physician, you'll have clear, indisputable proof of your injuries. Click here for more information.