Injuries in Virginia Pedestrian Accidents

Below, A Virginia pedestrian accident attorney discusses the most common types of injuries that occur from pedestrian accidents and what to do if the pain of your injuries doesn’t set in until later. To learn more to discuss your claim, call and schedule a consultation today.

What Are The Most Common Injuries That Result From Pedestrian Accidents?

The most minor, the hematomas or bruises, basically every pedestrian accident case will involve those. But also these cases often involve strained muscles, pulled muscles, lots of broken bones, traumatic brain injury. Traumatic brain injury and broken bones are very common in pedestrian accidents. Another sort of common damages in pedestrian accidents would be dental work. Pedestrians who are struck be vehicles instinctively react by trying to break their fall. Unfortunately pedestrians often are injured at the point of impact with the ground in addition to the injuries from the impact with the vehicle.

A lot of this is going to depend on traffic, how busy of a street was it, if it’s a residential area, what the speed limit is, whether someone is driving recklessly, in as far as an excessive speed goes or if the driver is just not paying attention. All these factors come into play and what causes the severity of the accidents, but also the weather conditions too. If you’re walking on the street and there’s a  sheet of ice on the ground, the ice can make for a heavier impact with the body. Cement is hard enough, but landing on cement covered in ice might make you more likely to sustain a fracture, for instance.

What To Do If The Pain of the Accident Doesn’t Set Until Later

Just like with any other accident case, if you’re involved in an accident, a lot of the time you’ll experience shock and the pain might not set in until later. With soft tissue injuries it might take a day or so until the pain really gets to where you feel like you should seek medical attention.

If you’ve been struck by a vehicle, whether you’re driving or a pedestrian, it’s important to seek medical attention as soon as possible. Don’t try to be Superman, don’t try to tough it out, if you’ve been in an accident, the sooner you can get care or treatment the better.

Doing so, not only from a legal standpoint, but just taking care of yourself, is extremely important. There are some injuries that get worse the longer they go without care and the sooner that you can have a doctor, a medical professional evaluate your injuries and come up with a treatment plan the better.

If the pain doesn’t set in until a couple of days later, you’ve got to take care of yourself. If it takes a couple of days before you start experiencing pain, then as soon as it does set in, make sure that you get treatment and explain to your doctor what happened so that they can properly treat you and relate your injuries to the accident that actually caused your injuries.

A lot of the time people forget to explain to their doctors how they got hurt. It seems simple and it seems obvious, but a lot of the time people forget to describe the way their injuries occurred and the doctors can only treat patients based on the history that’s related to them and their observations on examination.

They might check for other injuries that they might not otherwise be aware of if you just go in and tell them that you got sore back, but you don’t indicate that you’re struck by a car the night before.