If you’re involved in a serious car accident, you could suffer a spinal cord injury. These injuries can range widely in severity. In some cases, you may just have mild back pain for a few days, along with some stiffness. In other cases, you may suffer an injury that means you can never walk again.
As such, it’s important to know what signs to look for after you get involved in the crash. How do you know if you have a spinal cord injury? How serious is it?
What signs should alert you to problems
Perhaps the most severe symptom to look for is a loss of movement. With a serious injury, you’re may have this loss of movement from the point of that injury downward.
But it may not just be movement. You may have a loss of sensation, such as an inability to feel cold or heat, and you could have a loss of bladder or bowel control. You may also have issues with sexual function or fertility, you could have exaggerated reflex activities, you may experience muscle spasms, and you could feel an intense pain that manifests as a stinging sensation. This happens when the nerve fibers have been damaged.
Finally, some spinal cord injuries lead to difficulty breathing. This should be considered an emergency and you need to seek medical help. In fact, no matter what type of spinal cord injury you have, the best thing to do is to work with medical professionals to find out the extent and the treatment options you have.
Needless to say, treatment for an injury like this is not going to be cheap, so it’s also wise to know how to seek financial compensation if someone else caused the crash.