Steps To Take Following An Injury in Virginia

If you are injured in any type of accident in Virginia you have a number of important decisions ahead including whether you should go to the emergency room and whether you should take time off from work. Below, a Virginia injury attorney discusses these conundrums and how they can have an impact on your injury case. To learn more call and schedule a consultation today.

Determining Whether To Go To The Emergency Room

In most cases if you have been injured then you should go to the emergency room and seek medical attention as soon as possible. A lot of times after a serious accident you may be in shock and therefore not realize the severity of your injury. It is also common that back injuries, neck injuries particularly injuries that don’t involve broken bones but involve damages to your muscles and your tendons and your ligaments, oftentimes take a few days to fully emerge. You may not really notice how badly it hurts until the night after your accident you might wake up in the middle of the night in pain, or even the next day or a few days later.

With that said, going to the emergency room is not viable for every case. If you have sustained relatively minor injuries and you feel comfortable with your primary care physician, it may make sense to see them first, but it is important to receive care as soon as you can after an injury, and in most cases the Emergency Room is the most effective way to do that.

Determining Whether To Take Time Off Work

As with the emergency room, this is also a decision that is different for each person and the injury they suffered. Generally, if your injuries keep you from being able to do your job, then you need to focus on getting better, you need to follow your doctor’s orders, be vigilant in keeping track of any changes in your condition, and work to do what you can to get better and get back to work. The law in all three of the jurisdictions of Maryland, Virginia, and D.C., requires that you do what you can to prevent your damages from getting worse.

In most cases this means seeking timely medical treatment and following your doctor’s orders. With that in mind, if your doctor says you can’t work, then you shouldn’t be working.  It is important to always receive medical treatment as soon as possible, and the sooner you can see a doctor who is equipped to care for your injuries, the sooner you can have a treatment plan put together to get you on the road to recovery.

Unfortunately it’s just the nature of our type of work, but we often see people who have been seriously injured and are unable to work for months or years at a time. If you need to take time off of work to get better, then that’s what you should do. If you ever have any questions about returning to work, you can always ask your lawyer for help getting in touch with your doctor to assist in determining whether you can return to work.