Car accidents are the most common type of personal injury accident. They are regular, everyday occurrences, but the people who walk away from them all have different types of injuries in varying levels of severity.
How long you spend in the hospital, your prognosis and the outcome of your case depend on the types of injury you sustain. Here is a brief guide of common injuries, their complications and their recovery times.
Broken bones
These are extremely common, but there is also a great level of variability and recovery time. For example, a broken finger may only be wrapped for a few weeks while it heals, but a fractured femur needs specialized, immediate treatment, surgery and often months of recovery.
Any broken bone is serious, but the recovery may vary significantly depending on location and the severity, whether it is an open or closed fracture.
Spinal cord injuries
A spinal cord injury can occur along the neck or spine. These injuries can vastly impact a person’s ability to move and take care of themselves. Depending on how extensive the damage to the spinal tissue is, a person may never fully recover. These are all extended-recovery time injuries.
A person with a spinal cord injury will almost certainly have surgery to repair the damage and extensive rehab. This treatment course is lengthy and expensive.
Burns, scrapes and other skin damage
Damaged skin, especially burns and significant scrapes, is extremely painful and prone to infection. Without proper wound care treatment, a person with a large burn or abrasion may contract many infectious diseases, complicating their recovery.
Traumatic brain injuries
We recently wrote on traumatic brain injuries and their severity. As a class of damage, they are frequent and extremely serious.