What if my car accident injury shows up days later?

Well, there are times when people get in crashes and they don’t feel everything or even the they don’t feel the degree of injury they do days later. So, sometimes what happens clearly after you get in a crash, the first thing that the body does as a protective measure is adrenaline kicks in. The body naturally releases adrenaline and that will for various reasons cause me not to feel pain immediately as much as I do after. So, but what can happen even there’s there’s lots of different things that can occur over the following days. Of course, it depends on what treatments received. Sometimes people will go to the doctor right away, but let’s face it, there’s lots of people. I would be one of these people. If I get in a crash, unless and again, if you’re hurting right away, of course you’re going to go in, but sometimes you’re a little sore and you’re not sure where it’s going to go. So, what we’d all naturally hope is, hey, maybe if I just wait, it’s going to go away. And then what happens in the days that follow is it just progressively starts to get worse and worse and worse until you decide guess what I don’t think I can get away without going in and being seen and getting treatment and then people go in. So um I think the key though in that scenario uh we as lawyers we look at what we term a gap in care. So you know what’s a gap in care? I get hurt. I don’t go to the doctor for x many days. Well, then I got to try to figure out, okay, so you call me, your collision was two weeks ago, and you haven’t been to the doctor yet, but you tell me you’re in pain. First question that I have back then is,”Well, when did your pain started?” And tell me what you’ve been doing. Okay? Might be the scenario where they say, “Well, you know, I woke up the morning after. I was a little sore, but I’ve gotten progressively worse.” Okay. What’d you do? Okay. I took over the counter pain medications. I took hot showers. I had my significant other, my wife would ever rub my neck. Um, you know, you did things like that. 

That’s much easier to establish that you had injuries and to be able to prove them back to the crash. And if you basically say, “I wasn’t doing anything.” And again, there’s situations where pain can come out of nowhere even, you know, a week or two after. Some would claim even longer than that. I struggle with that the longer the time frame is. Um, but there can be issues where, you know, you have a herniated disc and the herniate, you know, the the disc thins and then ultimately herniates and then the pain kicks up a lot. Um, so it can happen that way. I think the key though is as injuries come on after a crash, the best advice is probably get in early, get checked. If you don’t though, make sure in the scenario where you’re talking to somebody, if you’re talking to me, I’m going to ask all those questions to try to figure out, well, like tell me the story of how this progressed to better link it back. Um, but it’s, you know, it’s one of those things where the body is going to do what the body does, and we’re all a little different. Everybody has different pain thresholds.

Higher the pain threshold, the more you might be able to put it off. But at the end of the day, you got to get the facts. You got to get the information. You got to link it back. And then people have to get to the right medical providers to be able to help them figure out what happened, what it’s related to, so that they can testify as experts and such so that you can prove medical causation in your car crash or whatever injury case you’re dealing.