You had a Car Accident Injury Yesterday:

Did you go to the hospital for injuries? If you hurt, go now.

Car Accident Injury 

For what you may think are minor injuries it is still important to document everything.  Take pictures of scrapes, swelling at the scene and if you are taken to the hospital for lacerations, take pictures of stitches.  This can be very important for the insurance company if legal action is taken and also for a jury in the case that it goes to trial. Remember there is never too much information recorded.  This is all to protect yourself. Even life threatening brain injuries sometimes do not manifest themselves for hours. This is why it is standard protocol for most emergency rooms to issue instructions as to monitoring patients for a deterioration of their symptoms when sending someone home who might have suffered a brain injury.

You had a Car Accident Injury a Week Ago:

You may feel like you had not incurred any injury but some symptoms do not start until the following days after the accident.  Is it too late to get medical help and claim your injuries?  No it is not.  Often the body is not in immediate pain. A very large percentage of serious injuries, are not apparent immediately. Even life threatening brain injuries sometimes do not manifest themselves for hours. This is why it is standard protocol for most emergency rooms to issue instructions as to monitoring patients for a deterioration of their symptoms when sending someone home who might have suffered a brain injury.

Even in minor accidents your body may have come in contact of with some object, usually the inside of the car; or rapid change in speed of your body, such as in a whiplash accident. In this situation, your body can be subjected to life threatening force, without significant damage to the vehicles. In fact sometimes the injuries are worse because the energy of the collision is transferred to movement rather than destruction of the vehicle.

You had a Car Accident Injury a Month Ago:

It may have been weeks before you started having problems with your back or your neck. Again this is a common occurrence, especially if a person had other more obvious pain at the time of the accident. Many times, the body only notices the worst pain. If you have been in an accident, you may have scrapes and bruises all over your body. You may be stiff all over and everything seems to ache. In such situation, even major injury to your neck or back, may not be focused on. In some cases, it may take weeks for a body part which has been weakened by the injury, to snap.

Even if you were wearing your seatbelt an injury can occur.  Seatbelts saves lives, by reducing the risk of hitting the windshield or being thrown from the vehicle. However, by holding the waste and one shoulder of the person in a fixed position, it actually increases the acceleration/deceleration forces on the head, neck and back. In addition, the twisting that occurs because only one shoulder is held stationary, adds rotational or centrifugal force to the equation, which has even greater potential for injury. By all means, wear your seatbelt. But understand that seatbelts do not eliminate all injuries, and can in fact be the cause of much different injuries than would have occurred without having worn them. Such injuries are normally not as life threatening as hitting your head on the windshield or being thrown from a vehicle, but they can still be severe and disabling.

Next –  Traumatic Brain Injury in a Car Accident