The impact of a serious injury affects all aspects of the car accident victim’s life, including their ability to earn a living and accomplish routine daily tasks. These consequences of serious car accident injuries become the damages in a Baytown car accident injury claim.
Understanding common car accident injuries and their impacts on survivors helps injury victims and their family members understand common injury damages.
Whiplash and Other Neck and Back Injuries
The crash force of an accident propels a motorist forward at the speed the car was traveling before the collision until the seatbelt snaps them back against the seat. A 120-pound person becomes a 5,400-pound force in a collision at only 45 miles per hour, placing the body’s skeletal structure under tremendous stress. As the head and upper body whip back and forth in a crash, it overextends and damages the delicate structures in the spinal cord, causing injuries to the vertebrae, muscles, tendons, and nerves in the neck and back.
Head and Brain Injuries
The human head and brain are highly vulnerable to injuries in a crash, due to the forceful back and forth motion of a collision, which shakes the brain and causes it to bump and twist inside the skull. Traumatic brain injuries in Baytown range in severity from mild concussions to severe diffuse axonal injury with permanent impairment or death.
External head, facial, and dental injuries are also common in car accidents, resulting from blunt force trauma from the airbag and contact with the structures inside the vehicle such as the steering wheel, dash, and windows.
Broken Bones
Car accidents cause trauma to the body’s bones through both the crash force of the collision and blunt force trauma caused by the inward collapse of the car’s metal, glass, and plastic structures. La porte car accident victims often suffer single or multiple fractures in bones such as the limbs, hips, ribs, clavicle, and pelvis.
Internal Organ Injuries
Crash force experts explain that three collisions occur in every car accident, the collision between the vehicle and another car or obstacle, the collision of the body with the seatbelt and airbag (or the inside structure of the vehicle if a motorist isn’t wearing a seatbelt), and the internal collisions of organs inside body cavities. When an internal organ suffers injury in a car accident, it is a life-threatening emergency, often causing internal bleeding and organ failure.
Spinal Cord Injuries
When the vertebrae in the back suffer trauma in a car accident, the spinal cord may sustain damage from broken shards of bone or due to the pressure of inflammation. When the spinal cord suffers an injury that damages the sensitive nerves responsible for transmitting messages back and forth between the brain and body, the accident victim suffers the loss of sensation and movement ability (paralyzation) below the point of the injury.
Soft-Tissue Injuries
Injuries to the body’s soft tissues are the most common car accident injuries, causing trauma to muscles, tendons, ligaments, and nerves. Soft-tissue injuries in car accidents include sprains, strains, torn ligaments, tendon injuries, nerve damage, contusions (bruises), lacerations, and burns.
Traumatic Amputations
The force of a car accident combined with the sudden, powerful inward collapse of the vehicle structure sometimes causes the traumatic amputation of a hand, foot, or limb. In other instances, the trauma to a body part may be so extensive that doctors are unable to save it, resulting in a necessary medical amputation.
Wrongful Death
The most serious injuries are catastrophic, life-altering injuries that cause permanent disability or fatal injuries resulting in an accident victim’s death. For legal counsel on your unique case, call our best wrongful death attorneys in Baytown, Texas today.
How Can a Car Accident Attorney Help Me?
Car accident injuries require expensive medical treatment and often necessitate missed work days during the recovery period. Catastrophic injuries may cause disability and an inability to return to the workforce in the previous capacity, or at all.
Call the car accident lawyers at Linebaugh, Dority, & Associates for a successful car accident compensation claim to recover damages such as medical expenses, lost earnings, compensation for pain and suffering, or wrongful death benefits to a surviving family member.