You've probably heard the advice to go to the hospital or at least see a doctor after a car accident. But what if you feel fine? The truth is, even if you're not bleeding, nothing seems broken, and you have no obvious signs of injury, you still might not be fine.
A number of common injuries sustained in car accidents may not show immediate symptoms. After an accident, your adrenaline is high and may prevent you from feeling immediate pain. Other symptoms simply take time to manifest. That's why you should always seek medical treatment after an accident, no matter what.
Take a look at some common car accident injuries that frequently produce delayed symptoms.
Bleeding Internally
Just because you don't see blood doesn't mean that you aren't bleeding somewhere. A hard impact, like the kind sustained during an auto accident, could cause you to bleed internally.
This causes two problems: not only are you losing blood, but the blood is also pooling inside your body instead of outside, putting pressure on your internal organs. This could damage those organs and cause other symptoms as well.
In many cases, an injury that's severe enough to cause internal bleeding is obvious, but that's not always the case. A small internal injury that causes a small amount of bleeding could go unnoticed, but as you move around, you could aggravate the injury, making it larger and causing the bleeding to become more severe.
Minor internal bleeding can stop on its own, but you should still be under a doctor's observation to ensure that it does stop and doesn't become more serious. It's also important that the injury is identified so that you can take precautions to avoid exacerbating it.
If the bleeding becomes more serious, it may require surgery. You may also need IV fluids or blood transfusions to keep your blood pressure at a safe level.
The symptoms of internal bleeding include a purplish-colored skin at the site of the injury and dizziness or lightheadedness as the blood loss increases. Depending on where in the body the bleeding is occurring, you may also experience pain, swelling, tightness, headaches, and seizures.
Traumatic Brain Injury
In movies and television shows, characters often take hard knocks on the head — hard enough to knock them out or make them dizzy — and then see them walking around with no ill effects in the next scene. This type of portrayal of head injuries could lead you to believe that head injuries are often no big deal. However, nothing could be further from the truth.
If you are in an accident and hit your head, and especially if you hit your head hard enough to daze you or knock you out, you need medical attention. You could have a concussion or a traumatic brain injury.
Many of the symptoms of a traumatic brain injury or concussion won't be immediately obvious to you. These injuries can leave you with difficulty concentrating or thinking clearly, memory problems, irritability and mood instability, and sleep problems, as well as headaches, dizziness, balance problems, and noise or light sensitivity.
In the immediate aftermath of an accident, you may not see a headache as a serious symptom. You might expect to feel off-balance and unfocused, even if you didn't have a head injury. You have no way of knowing if these are normal reactions to the stress of an accident, or if you've sustained an injury to your brain.
Meanwhile, sleep symptoms or problems with concentration and focus might not become obvious until you try to sleep, work, or study. The safest thing to do is have yourself checked for signs of a serious head injury right away after a car accident.
Whiplash
Whiplash occurs when your head rapidly moves forward, backward, or sideways, the way it would with a sudden impact. Your car doesn't have to be going particularly fast at the time of the crash to sustain a whiplash injury, and the symptoms can take weeks or even months to develop.
Whiplash injuries are complex and can be difficult to treat. They affect muscles, joints, ligaments, and nerves, and can cause symptoms in your neck, head, jaw, and lower back. A mild whiplash injury can take six to nine months to heal, and more serious injuries can persist for two years or more.
When it comes to whiplash, you need to establish when and where the injury occurred so that you can be compensated for your treatment by the insurance company or the other driver. Because symptoms don't always occur immediately, the insurer could argue that you sustained the injury at some point after the accident.
Getting medical treatment in the immediate aftermath of an accident is not only better for your health, it also documents your condition immediately after the accident. Even if you don't immediately know that you have whiplash, your medical records can establish that your condition was consistent with a whiplash injury.
Following your doctor's recommendation for follow-up care can help establish that any symptoms that arise later stem from the accident.
Any lawyer will tell you that after an accident, medical care should be your first priority, whether or not you think you have an injury. After that, you should contact an accident attorney to find out how you can receive compensation for your injuries.