Understanding the Long-Term Effects of Car Accidents: Physical, Emotional, and Financial Impact
After a car crash, the pain from your injuries may soon fade if you’re lucky. But for many more people that sustain serious injuries, the long-term effects of car accidents will never go away.
Serious injuries often have lifelong consequences. It goes far beyond the physical pain and changes that may hinder mobility or make it impossible to enjoy what you once loved. These injuries can impact your mental well-being and your finances too.
You likely want to put all this behind you, but you should know everything that is at stake. This will help you make the right decisions when dealing with your insurance company and your legal rights. When someone else’s negligence leads you to these circumstances, you will most certainly want to speak with a car accident attorney to find out the total compensation you can obtain to make your life whole again.
After all, why should you be stuck paying for it all when you didn’t do anything wrong? Take a deeper look at the long-term physical, mental, and financial impacts of car accidents.
Physical Consequences of Car Accident Injuries in the Long-Term
Depending on the nature of the accident and your injuries, you may suffer from pain or an altered way of life. You may have back injuries, traumatic brain injuries, spinal cord injuries, or internal organ damage, all of which can change the rest of your life in different ways. You’ll likely need ongoing treatments and perhaps multiple surgeries to repair the physical damage you’ve suffered.
It’s important that you work with each doctor treating you for your injuries and keep organized records of all treatments. You should follow everything they order for the care of your injuries. Doing so will help you in your car accident claim.
You may experience chronic pain for the rest of your life, have limited mobility, paralysis, lose control of your bowels, have nerve damage, organ malfunction, loss of muscular strength, scarring, disfigurement, or vision or hearing loss. Each of these consequences for your car accident injuries will mean you need to adjust to life in a different way. Due to this, it will likely also have lasting impacts on your mental and emotional health.
Long-Term Mental and Emotional Health Consequences of a Car Accident Injury
Even if you heal from your serious car accident injuries, you may be emotionally and mentally impacted in the long term. For those that have lasting physical consequences from their car accident injuries, coping can be extremely difficult. You should be prepared for how the challenges you’ve faced can affect your overall mental health.
Common long-term psychological consequences of car accident injuries often include anxiety and depression. You may also face migraine headaches, cognitive impairments, memory loss, trouble concentrating, and suffer from insomnia. Additionally, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) affects 39.2% of car accident victims.
Financial Consequences of a Car Accident Injury in the Long-Term
As you work to heal from your physical injuries and handle the lasting consequences of them while struggling with mental health, there are financial ramifications to face. Treatment, especially long-term, can be exceedingly expensive. If you’ve suffered traumatic injuries, you may be wondering how to handle all the expenses that come from a car accident.
Most commonly, car accident victims will have a long road of financial struggles ahead that include but are not limited to the following items.
Medical Expenses
From the moment the ambulance whisks you off to the hospital, your medical expenses will start piling up. You may require emergency surgery, physical therapy, and psychological care from those injuries. These expenses may be something you will have to contend with for your lifetime if you will always need regular treatment for the injuries from your accident.
Loss of Income and Benefits
For those that suffer extreme injuries in a car accident, it may be impossible to return to work in the short term or even down the road. This will mean you’ll lose your income and the benefits that come with them. You may be rendered unable to ever work again and suffer the consequences of having no economic stability.
Other Out-of-Pocket Costs
You will likely need prescriptions, medical supplies, or even upgrades made in your home to help you get around after the accident. These expenses all come at a huge cost, further adding to your economic burden.
What to Know About the Insurance Company’s Role
There are two big mistakes that car accident victims often make, according to attorneys. The first is that they deeply underestimate the expenses they will incur from the injuries. The other mistake they make is in thinking that the insurance company will cover all of those costs.
Insurance adjusters will try to limit the settlement offers for every claim. While they can’t dispute the total of your medical bills that you’ve already received or the income you’ve lost up to this point, they may challenge your future claimed losses.
The only way to truly know the fair amount for your future losses is to get legal guidance. While you may be offered a settlement that sounds like a good amount of money, it might not be enough to cover everything. This will continue to impact your financial situation and create further hardships.
Why should you be stuck with all these bills when someone else’s negligence caused your life to change in a fraction of a second? This is precisely why every personal injury attorney will tell you never to accept a settlement offer without first getting legal counsel.
Signing an insurance settlement agreement waives your rights to any future compensation for this accident and the injuries that resulted from it. Instead, schedule a consultation with a Portland car accident lawyer who has experience in helping those who have endured long-term consequences from car accidents. They will have a wealth of knowledge and resources to seek and obtain the maximum compensation for your past losses as well as the ones in the future too.
