Some Dangerous Injuries Can be Slow to Develop, and Slow to Detect

Likely, you have an image of the typical accident or accident victim, in your head of the typical accident victim who gets in an accident, gets hurt, feels pain, and gets a diagnosis for his or her injuries in the emergency room, or shortly after with a private doctor.

But in the real world, injuries don’t often happen that way. We often aren’t even aware of how injured we are immediately after an accident—in fact, with some types of injuries, we may not even be aware that we are injured at all right after the accident.

Brain Bleeds and Injuries

One type of injury that can be slow to develop, is bleeding in the brain. With a small, slow bleed inside the brain, the victim may feel absolutely fine for hours after an accident, and emergency room scans may show everything is normal.

But as the hours pass, that bleed gets bigger, to the point that the blood puts pressure on the brain itself. The result, just hours after the victim felt fine, can be death.

Damaged Ligaments and Tendons

Have you ever seen a professional athlete get injured, then go back into the game, and then the day after it is reported that the athlete has torn or injured a ligament or a tendon?

That can happen to you also—and the pain of a damaged ligament may not even be apparent to you until hours after the accident or until the very next morning.

Sometimes this is because swelling and inflammation take time to manifest as pain. It may also be because immediately after an accident, your adrenaline is masking the pain. Or, it may just be that the ligament that was injured wasn’t one that you were paying much attention to after an accident.

Either way, you soon realize that there is something very wrong when you have limited range of movement and pain.

Bleeding of Organs

Just like your brain can slowly bleed, so too can other organ inside your body. And when they do, you may not feel it right away—at least, not until the organ itself starts to die, or until you have lowered blood pressure from the bleed, or until the bleed puts pressure on other internal organs.

Don’t Assume You Aren’t Injured

Just because an emergency room doesn’t find anything wrong with you, doesn’t mean that you are OK after an accident. Always be monitored in the hours after an accident, with someone around you that can call for help if needed.

Remember that ERs and their staff are really only meant to triage and stabilize you from immediate harm—not to monitor you or check all your systems for longer-term injuries. After an accident, always follow up with your doctor, and don’t assume that because you feel OK after an accident,  you aren’t injured.

Are you more injured than you thought you were? Contact the Las Vegas personal injury lawyers at Cameron Law today at 702-745-4545.

Sources:

healthline.com/health/internal-bleeding

my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/10265-back-strains-and-sprains