Car accidents are often confusing and frightening for those who experience them. It may feel like a great relief to make it through an accident with no pain or discomfort afterwards. While it is certainly possible to experience an accident without suffering injuries, this is less common than many people realize.
In fact, some of the most harmful injuries do not cause pain or discomfort right away. Delayed pain injuries may not produce pain for a few hours, such as whiplash, or may remain hidden for a week or more in the case of a mild traumatic brain injury.
If you recently experienced a car accident and believe that you did not suffer any injuries, you should still seek a complete medical examination from your doctor or medical care provider. A thorough examination helps identify delayed pain injuries before they produce pain or create long-term, potentially deadly complications. For more information, contact a Chicago car accident lawyer today.
Internal bleeding
If your car accident left you with internal injuries, you may have internal bleeding that you cannot feel. Like bleeding externally, if you lose too much blood from your circulation system, your blood pressure drops dangerously low and you may die quickly, before you ever feel any serious discomfort.
Likewise, even small internal injuries can prove dangerous. If left untreated, minor internal bleeding can lead to a major infection, which may spread throughout the circulatory system and kill you painfully and slowly. This is entirely avoidable with timely medical care.
Damaged organs
When the organs in your body suffer partial damage, they often continue to function in a limited capacity while the body’s natural processes try to repair them. If the body successfully heals itself, you might never realize the injury occurred in the first place, but if the body cannot heal the organ, it eventually shuts it down entirely. In most cases, once one organ shuts down for business, the other organs shut down as well.
Once your organs fail, you face a slow painful decline that you may or may not be able to recover from, even with proper treatment. Seeking proper medical care directly following an accident is the best way to avoid these injuries and many others, minimizing your medical expenses, lost work and income, and length of recovery. In addition, prompt medical care may save your life before you even realize it is in danger.
Protecting your rights in Illinois while you recover is no easy task. Dealing with the legal issues at hand may take a significant amount of time. Don’t heist to use strong legal resources and guidance to keep your rights secure and protect your priorities while you work toward recovery.