If you get involved in a serious car accident, you may count yourself lucky to walk away. Despite the devastation on the road and the damage to your car, you may think that you have no symptoms and you were not injured.
Until the next day, that is. Even just hours after the crash, you may start to notice pain, discomfort, inflammation and all sorts of other delayed symptoms.
You may actually have a significant injury. Just because you didn’t know it at the scene of the wreck doesn’t mean that you’re not injured. You want to seek medical care as soon as possible, especially if you suspect something like a spinal cord injury, a skull fracture or a traumatic brain injury.
How could that delay happen?
People often assume that serious injuries couldn’t go unnoticed like this, but the truth is that adrenaline can mask a lot of pain. Your body has a fight-or-flight response that has been evolutionarily honed to help you push the pain aside in the name of survival. People who were injured in primitive times needed to fight off attackers or wild animals, or they needed to live until they could get care at a nearby settlement.
Today, of course, you don’t necessarily need that fight-or-flight response since you can get medical care at the hospital quickly, but that doesn’t change the way your body reacts. This can actually be a hindrance to your recovery if it means you put off the care that you should have gotten right after the crash.
Do you still have a claim if your reaction was delayed?
Regardless, when you do start to notice these kinds of delayed symptoms and head to the hospital, you need to seek compensation to cover your medical costs and other losses. Your injuries are still connected to that accident, no matter when you realized you were hurt.