You blink, and in that instant, your world jolts. Your shoulders hunch, your head whips forward, then slams back against the headrest. When you look up, you see another car impossibly close in your rearview mirror.
A rear-end collision isn’t uncommon, so you know the drill. You step out and get a name, registration and insurance information. You call the police to come out for the accident report and before they let you hang up they ask if anyone needs EMS. You’re feeling fine, the other driver feels okay, and not wanting to make this a bigger scene you both agree it’s not needed.
A few days later though, the headache that arrived the night after the accident still hasn’t quite gone away. Your neck, too, hasn’t felt the same since. Meanwhile, you’ve already received word that the other driver’s insurance will cover the damage to your bumper. But you’re starting to think that wasn’t the extent of the damage. You might need to go to the hospital.
What happens now? Is there compensation for delayed pain after a car accident? We’ll explore the answers to these questions and help you understand the path ahead as you seek justice for delayed pain after a car accident.
Why is there Delayed Pain After a Car Accident?
In the minutes after a car accident, you might feel perfectly fine or feel fine enough that you don’t want to bother with heading to a hospital. While we think of pain and injury as two sides of the same coin, it’s rarely that clear cut. Even if you’re not experiencing shock after an accident, pain may not show up on your radar at all. In one study, 37% of emergency victims were injured but did not feel pain at the time the injury occurred.
Additional factors, like stress, can distract from pain that may be there from the start. Or, in other cases, stress can combine with the injury in the weeks following and become a persistent source of pain.
Soft Tissue Injuries Elude EMS Diagnosis
In many car accidents, there aren’t clear indications of injury like burns, cuts, or bone fractures. Even when those do appear, they don’t necessarily indicate the full extent of the damage. This is related to the physics of a car accident: the body tends to stay in motion as the car is coming to a stop. This movement causes soft-tissue organs to collide with bones, muscles to strain and stretch, and bones shift around at high speeds.
Even in situations where accident victims do call for emergency medical services, these kinds of injuries can be difficult to catch. The tools available to first-responders limit their ability to accurately diagnose underlying injuries that seatbelts and bone intrusion into organs cause. Other common injuries, like whiplash can take days to show up as well.
Pain Can Build Over Time
There’s also pain that comes from overcompensating for an injury. If one body party is injured, other nearby joints, bones, or muscles may become pushed into pain through overcompensating, and it may take days for that pain to appear.
Injuries like vertebral (or spinal) compression fractures are just one example. When a vertebra fractures due to an accident, it might not be noticed at first. Instead, slowly worsening back pain that does not resolve is a good indication of a possible underlying injury.
Accident victims can also suffer compounding injuries, worsening an injury through regular movement. As a victim moves through daily activities unaware of the injury, they may aggravate an injury instead of aiding the healing process along. Walking on a broken leg would be an obvious case, but there are other, harder to notice instances that are similarly consequential.
Why Seek Immediate Treatment?
Regardless of the pain you’re experiencing in the moments after an accident, our attorneys recommend seeking treatment beyond EMS. Even seemingly minor pains might indicate a more extensive injury that requires immediate intervention. Some examples include:
- Headaches: People may experience headaches after a car accident, despite not hitting anything during the accident. However, these headaches may be a sign of whiplash injuries, a concussion, or in one instance, focal neurological deficits that can impact speech and muscle strength.
- Elevated heart rate: An elevated heart rate can have numerous causes, making an accurate diagnosis difficult to obtain. In one case, even when doctors had treated a patient after the accident, an elevated heart rate two weeks after treatment indicated more extensive issues. The doctors then discovered the accident caused a life-threatening build up of fluid in the patient’s heart.
Get a Second Opinion
Even when victims do proceed to a hospital or physician for treatment, it’s worth getting a second opinion. In some cases, when a patient seeks treatment well after the accident, the initial treating physician may associate complications and pain with pre-existing illnesses or conditions rather than the accident. Symptoms and pain are only one source of information and can cloud a diagnosis. In some cases, more advanced techniques are the only way to identify the true source.
What To Do When There’s Delayed Pain
If you’re experiencing delayed pain after an accident—whether it’s been days, weeks, or months—you should seek treatment straightaway. Regardless of how intense or extensive the pain is, it should be given the attention it deserves. Everything else can only be sorted out if you seek and receive treatment for your injuries. Here are the broad steps after you experience delayed pain after a car accident.
1. Seek Treatment For Your Injuries
Getting the treatment you and your body need is always the first step after a car accident, and is especially true for delayed pain car accident claims. In addition to getting victims on the road to recovery, this treatment forms part of the basis for the claim, as these are costs a victim would not have to pay were it not for the accident.
2. Document Everything
Besides treating the injuries, you should also document the pain, treatment, and other symptoms you may be experiencing. Medical records aren’t the full picture of the accident, nor the individual’s injuries. Recording pain and symptoms in a journal can show how extensive the injuries were, the impact they had on a victim’s life, and potentially show where an initial diagnosis was wrong.
You should also document all costs from this point forward. This includes medical bills but isn’t limited to it. If you have to miss work for health care and follow up appointments, document any loss in pay that might result or lost vacation days. If you have to stay overnight close to a facility or incur transportation costs you wouldn’t otherwise have to pay, document these as well. If there are events, opportunities, or gatherings that the injuries prevent you from participating in, document these as well.
3. Continue Treatment
Continue receiving the treatment you need. It might seem like it’s not worth saying, but two common reasons may arise that can cause a person to reconsider ongoing treatments. First, the cost. As a victim continues to receive care for their injuries, they’ll receive bills from those providers. The prospect of having to pay these bills out of pocket can dissuade a person from continuing their treatment. But injured victims can fight to recover these costs and avoid the financial devastation they could cause.
Second, a victim may begin to feel better and feel that treatment is unnecessary. While improvement is a great sign, it doesn’t mean that you’ve reached the end of recovery. If your doctors continue to recommend treatments, you should adhere to these to the letter. Not only is it medically necessary, it can also help show that you did not contribute to your injuries worsening.
4. Contact a Trusted Attorney
Before you contact an insurance company to file a claim, or supplement an existing one, speak with an experienced car accident attorney. Obstacles are littered across the road ahead, but they can be cleared with trusted fighters in your corner. As we’ll explain below, delayed pain car accident claims can run into challenges that can cause people working on their own to turn back.
Is There Compensation for Delayed Pain After a Car Accident?
There may still be compensation available to you after delayed pain appears, though it may not be as straightforward. To better grasp how seeking treatment for delayed pain can impact an insurance claim, settlement, or lawsuit it helps to know some of the basics of these processes.
After you seek treatment, the at-fault driver’s insurance company may have their own procedures for amending the claim, so you’ll want to speak with that company to better understand how to adjust your claim.
You’ll also likely need to gather the relevant documentation about your treatment, like bills or an explanation of benefits letter from your health insurance company. This information will form the basis of the compensation for a delayed pain car accident claim which is why it’s important to begin documenting these costs as soon as possible.
Prepare for an Insurance Company Challenge
When you do supplement the claim, there may be a delay in processing from the insurance company or letters and calls from them. Adjusting the claim days, or possibly even weeks later, may raise alarm bells for the insurance company. They may attempt to argue that the injury you sought treatment for was not related to the car accident.
The insurance company may go as far as denying the supplemented claim altogether, doubting your pain and injuries in the process. This is one of the most important moments where having legal representation can make the difference for innocent accident victims.
How Insurance Companies Fight Delayed Pain Claims
As you work towards a settlement or even a lawsuit, the insurance company may repeatedly raise “causation issues.” Essentially, the insurance company doubts that the accident caused your injuries. In order to build a successful case, the injured person would have to prove four things:
- Duty: Generally, people owe a duty of reasonable care to others on the road. The law expects us to exercise reasonable care when driving to not injure or harm other drivers, pedestrians, or property.
- Breach of duty/Negligence: The injured victim would need to prove that the other person acted negligently—they failed to act reasonably given the circumstances. Perhaps they ran a red light, or were speeding in heavy rain.
- Causation: An injured victim needs to show that the other party’s negligence caused their injuries. This requires showing both that they would not have had the injuries but for the other person’s negligent act and that they proximately caused them. Essentially, the court will look to whether the injuries were a foreseeable result of the negligent act.
- Injury/Damages: In a claim of negligence, the injured victim is seeking compensation for the injuries they’ve received. They therefore need to prove what those injuries are, both that they were injured or their property was damaged and they incurred costs to repair or heal.
This third element, causation, is one area where the insurance company may challenge the claim. They may feel confident in holding out through settlement negotiations because they believe causation is too remote. They may point to the gap in time between the car accident and treatment as evidence that the two were unrelated. Or, they may challenge the injury entirely. The insurer may doubt there was an injury at all because—if there was—surely the victim would have gone to the hospital that day.
Having an attorney that tracked down as much evidence as possible, including expert testimony that shows how your injuries were the direct result of the accident can help keep the claim afloat. The journal documenting the pain can also show that these are not fictitious or phantom injuries, but real hardship and suffering caused by another person’s negligence.
How Attorneys Get Justice For Delayed Pain Victims
A claim denial letter from an insurance company isn’t where your fight for justice ends. As soon as you notice pain arising from the accident, you should contact an attorney with experience handling these claims. From that first phone call, a trusted attorney can help at every step along the way.
Attorneys Can Help Gather Documentation
The mountain of paperwork associated with insurance claims, healthcare, and car accidents can be overwhelming. Having an attorney working for you can ease the burden. They can track down the original accident report for you, track down the ICD-10 codes that initial physicians may have recorded, and collect all the documents related to your subsequent treatment.
They can also track down and gather the documentation that may be harder to come by or record, for example, receipts for transportation to and from hospitals and doctor’s offices and lost earnings. As you try to return to your regular routine, you may not have the time or energy to locate these important documents. But for your attorney, this is right at the heart of how they help you.
They can also gather evidence related to the accident. The best time to gather this evidence is in the immediate aftermath—the first few hours after. As time passes, memory fades, footage is deleted, and tire marks disappear. Recreating the accident scene without this information becomes a taller task. To do so, you need resources. However, an attorney with a well-resourced firm behind them can track down this evidence or find experts who can help them recreate it.
An Attorney Navigates Insurance Pitfalls
As you proceed with a delayed pain accident claim, you’ll need to contact insurance companies. Whether through letters or phone calls, the insurance company will record and save your conversations with them—not always for customer service quality either. Insurers may look through these conversations for evidence to deny the claim. Simple responses to questions, a detail about the accident, a polite response to “how are you doing?” can all become the basis for a denial.
If you’re speaking to the insurer alone, it’s easy to be unaware of these tricks and fall into these traps. But with an experienced delayed pain accident attorney working for you, you can avoid pitfalls. They can guide you through shady questions, prevent you from providing answers that aren’t necessary, and put the insurance company on notice not to play games.
Trusted Attorneys Pursue Your Best Interests
As you focus on recovering and receiving the treatment you need, it can feel like fighting for the compensation you deserve is just out of reach. When just getting through the day is a challenge, arguing with insurance adjusters is the last thing you want to spend your days on. An attorney can take up the challenge for you. While you recover, they fight.
An experienced, trustworthy attorney will fight to get you the maximum compensation owed while keeping you informed of your claim’s progress. Fighting for your best interest requires giving you the information you need to make the best decision for your health and well-being. Whether that means accepting a settlement or going to trial, a trusted attorney will prepare you for the outcomes either way.
Delayed Pain After a Car Accident? Call Montlick.
If you’ve been in an accident and have recently started to experience pain, there is help available. For real legal help. Our experienced attorneys fight for their clients every step of the way. From tracking down accident documentation to proving the connection between the accident and the injuries. We give our clients honest, straightforward counsel as we pursue maximum compensation and justice on their behalf. Contact us today – your initial consultation is always free.
