'Not So Obvious' Car Accident Injuries You Shouldn’t Ignore
This is a contributed post.
I'm sure a lot of people have seen that famous Monty Python (and the Holy Grail) scene, where John Cleese plays the Black Knight in his fight against King Arthur. The King starts to fight him, and the Knight loses his arm and responds: 'Tis but a scratch. Arthur keeps pushing, and the Knight loses the second one and follows up with: 'It’s just a flesh wound', completely unfazed and unaware of the reality.
That’s how plenty of people may feel after some car accidents.
The car’s still running. No airbags went off. You’re at the scene, the body is full of adrenaline, and you’re trying to answer some questions. Who knows, maybe you're the one who's also apologising. But then, everyone went home, and it even seemed kind of uneventful.
Regardless, a couple of days pass, and things start to feel a bit off. You’re waking up stiff, your head feels heavy, sleep isn't great, so you’re feeling more tired than usual. Normal daily movements suddenly take effort. That's when people realize that something is wrong. It's important to be aware that some injuries don't show up right away.
They don't always come in guns blazing in the form of sharp pain.
They’re subtle and can be seen in how you move, think, sleep, and how you handle stress.
Whiplash Isn't Just Neck Pain
It's also an independent psychological drama film written and directed by Damien Chazelle, starring Miles Teller and J. K. Simmons.
Jokes aside, besides being a great movie following the story of a young jazz drummer, it's also a serious neck injury that can often be easily disregarded.
People usually think it's just a stiff neck that can be fixed with a couple of minutes of an applied heating pad. When really, this is a whole body problem. While moving back and forth, you create tears in the muscles and ligaments in your neck, upper back, and shoulders.
From there, the inflammation gradually builds, which is why you see stiffness and headaches peak maybe a day or two after the crash, not right away. And this is where it gets sneaky on you. The body adapts. You don't turn your head as much, and the muscles start to pick up the slack. Your posture has changed without you realising.
Fast forward a few weeks, and that minor neck pain is now a little demon glued to your back, dedicated to restricting movement. It feels as if it was always there, so you’ve gotten used to it by now.
That’s why it's super important to detect it early and deal with it before it gets worse.
Concussions Without a Head Hit
One common myth is that you can’t get a concussion if you don’t literally hit your head.
Well, that’s not quite true.
You can injure your brain from a consistent stop-and-go motion. You don't have to have any bumps or bruises or a dramatic moment for this to happen.
You can just get it by moving weirdly or rapidly, or any way that your brain was not meant to move.
Some of the symptoms often are: brain fog, slower thinking, trouble focusing, poor sleep, or even irritability, which are easy to brush off as they can be attributed to stress or a lack of sleep.
If you see you have these symptoms and they start to add up, perhaps it’d be a good time to be aware. If you don't start taking care of your concussions, it's going to interfere with your daily life more and more, and it's just going to get worse.
The Side of Recovery No One Warns You About
Even when those injuries are not major, the recovery can disrupt your life. Now you need some time off work. Pay extra fees. Go to physical therapy appointments.
The assessment of those costs and limitations will vary based on where you’re located.
The 51% bar rule is in effect in Illinois as a modified comparative negligence.
That is different from New York, which follows a pure comparative negligence system.
In busy cities like Chicago, even minor crashes take much longer to recover from, because life just doesn’t stop. In addition to going through the physical pain, you have to figure out how to pay your medical bills, justify missed work, and get a sense of how to put things in place.
Once you find a way to calculate your Chicago crash settlement, and you finally understand the process, it's going to be way easier to have plans down the line and put back the missing pieces in your life.
Conclusion
Reduced movement can affect mood and motivation.
People withdraw a bit, become less active, less engaged, less themselves. Over time, that changes how people see their bodies and their identity. They stop trusting movement. They stop doing things they enjoy. It’s sad.
If we manage to detect those ‘delayed’ symptoms early, we can prevent any of those bad patterns from becoming permanent. After pretty much any car accident, there can be these hidden/ninja injuries that only show up when the damage is already there.
Early evaluation matters. And so does paying attention to how you’re functioning, not just how the car looks.
Recovery isn't just you lying in bed resting while watching Netflix. Recovery is both physical and psychological.
We need to take care of both the body and the mind to fully/truly recover.
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