Many accident victims feel fine in the first twenty minutes or even the first hour after an accident. Some even feel fine for the first day. It might only be days after the accident that you notice your injuries or connect them back to the accident – but is that too late to sue?
You can sue for any injuries that result from the accident, even if they appear later. It may be harder to connect the injuries to the accident, especially if it was days or weeks between when the accident happened and when you noticed the injury. However, strong medical evidence, assessments by medical experts, and evidence that there were no other causes of injury between the accident and the discovery can help prove your case.
For help with your injury case, call Mitchell Rogers Injury Law’s Las Vegas, NV personal injury lawyers at (702) 702-2622 today.
What Injuries Show Up Later After an Accident?
In the immediate aftermath of an accident, your body is filled with adrenaline. This and the general fight or flight response you feel might mask injuries and potentially block you from noticing even quite severe injuries. Only once you come down from the rush of the accident will you begin to notice aches and pains, and potentially even go into shock from substantial injuries.
Other injuries are also difficult to notice in the first day or so, and you might not feel them until a good night’s rest. In any case, many of these injuries are quite common, especially in car accidents, and you can definitely still try to sue for them.
Whiplash
One common injury that you usually do not feel until the next day is whiplash. The tendons, muscles, and other tissues in your neck often need a chance to relax and tighten back up before a whiplash injury becomes obvious.
Back Injuries
Similarly, inflammation and strains to the back might not hurt until they have tightened back up. Moreover, back injuries can go unnoticed until you place strain on your back again, which might highlight how bad the injury is.
Soft Tissue Injuries
Again, until tendons and muscles get a chance to relax, you might not feel strains, pulls, or even tears. It might also take using those muscles again to find the injury, which you might not notice if you were taking it easy in the days after an accident.
Internal Injuries
Sometimes the prudent thing to do is go to a hospital after an injury. Especially with head injuries, internal bleeding and other damage might not be discovered until scans are done. However, with other internal injuries like damage to internal organs, you might not know about the injury until days of pain lead you to a CT scan.
Broken Bones
Some people can live with broken bones for days without realizing it, especially if the fracture is a fine “hairline” fracture. It could take until the injury gets worse before you go to the hospital and get an X-ray that reveals the break.
Can You Sue for Injuries You Discover Later?
You can sue for any injury that factually stems from your accident. Some injuries can appear days or weeks later, but if your accident caused them, then they are valid grounds for a lawsuit.
The problem then becomes connecting the injury back to the lawsuit. If there were many days in between the accident and when you first noticed the injury, the defense will try to say that the injury came from another accident in the meantime. This might block you from being able to prove the injury was from this accident, but it does not stop your legal right to file your claim.
Proving Your Injury Was Related to Your Accident
Accidents can sometimes cause surprising and strange injuries. Even when you get medical care for an injury right after the accident, it can be hard to link the injury to the accident. When there is a delay between the accident and discovery of the injury, it becomes even harder to link the two, but certain evidence can help.
Medical Exams
Doctors can examine your injuries and, once provided with information about what happened, they can link the injury to the accident. Often, injuries that might surprise laypeople are obviously connected to an accident in the eyes of doctors and experts who study injuries and accidents, and they can draw the connecting line between the two.
Our Henderson, NV personal injury lawyers can seek out doctors and experts to examine your case and draw these connections.
Other Expert Reports
Doctors and experts can also explain what happens in an accident and why your body might have masked pain or other symptoms, making it harder for you to discover your injury. Judges and juries are often incredulous that you could have gone days or weeks without noticing a serious injury, but sometimes experts have explanations for this phenomenon.
Evidence of Other Medical Conditions
The reason that many people do not discover an injury right away is that they have another disability or chronic pain condition. If you have chronic pain, one more injury might not be that obvious to you. The same is true if you have a health condition that makes it harder to feel pain.
These factors can help us show why you didn’t immediately discover an injury that might seem obvious to someone else with the same injury.
Records of Other Activity
The defense will usually try to keep an injury out of your claim by saying either that you already had the injury before the accident or that you got it after the accident in an unrelated accident. If you can provide records of your activities and medical conditions from before and after the accident, you can help narrow down the cause.
For example, if you were under observation in the hospital in the days after your accident, and a new injury was discovered on the second or third day, the fact that you were in the hospital the whole time proves there was no other accident to have caused the injury.
Call Our Nevada Personal Injury Lawyers for Help Today
If you were hurt in an accident, contact the Boulder City, NV personal injury attorneys at Mitchell Rogers Injury Law at (702) 702-2622.