It’s not uncommon for injuries to reveal themselves days or even weeks after a car accident. For some injury sufferers, it can be difficult to determine cause and effect of injury symptoms to the neck and back if they don’t surface until days after an accident. For anyone recently injured in a car accident, if you begin to experience any of the following injury symptoms, you need to seek immediate medical attention to ensure your injuries are treated and to avoid the risk of the injuries becoming more serious.
Neck Injuries – Whiplash Trauma
Whiplash trauma is one of the most common neck injuries following an accident. Whiplash trauma symptoms can appear in one or more of the following ways: upper back and shoulder pain, fatigue, headaches, and neck pain and stiffness.
If you’ve been in a recent car accident and are experiencing one or more symptoms of neck injury or whiplash trauma it’s imperative you seek medical attention. You can go to your family doctor or an emergency physician to have your injuries assessed and treated.
Lower Back Pain
Lower back pain is extremely common for people who have been rear-ended or side-impacted in a car accident. A rear or side force to a vehicle causes intense lower back compression to the driver and passengers of the vehicle. Symptoms of lower back injury include changes in posture, chronic lower back pain and stiffness, shooting pain while sitting, and sometimes even weakness in upper legs.
Concussions and Headaches
Quite often headaches can be a direct result of injury to bodily muscles, ligaments and facet joints of the cervical spine, but they can also be the direct result of brain injury.
Symptoms like nausea, vomiting, disorientation, as well as headache are signs of serious concussion and should be immediately treated at the nearest hospital. If you’re not experiencing those symptoms or only mild forms of them then you could be suffering from a mild concussion. Concussions are caused by the brain being severely shaken inside the skull after hitting your head on the surface of your dash or steering wheel or window during a serious car accident.
Brain Injury
Head injuries of a more violent forward and backward force of the brain can cause severe bruising, swelling and bleeding to the area, which can result in a traumatic brain injury (TBI). Life altering injuries, including paralysis or long-term unresponsive states, can be caused by traumatic brain injury.
Serious symptoms of traumatic brain injury include:
- extreme confusion
- slurred speech
- agitation and unusual, uncommon behaviours
- inability to awaken from sleep
- repeated vomiting and nausea
- clear fluids draining from the nose or ears
- Dilation of one or both pupils
- convulsion or seizures
The impact of traumatic brain injuries can often be distressing. CAM LLP has experience working with rehabilitation and caregiving centres in Alberta, and we’re happy to help you find resources to aid in your recovery.
If you have questions about serious personal injury or traumatic brain injury, contact our Edmonton team of lawyers at CAM LLP for a free consultation. Together, we’ll assess your claim and help you get compensation for your injuries. If you’d like to learn more about how a personal injury claim works, from the initial consultation all the way to trial (only if necessary), click here.
Note: This blog post was originally published in October 2017 and has since been updated with relevant content
