Spinal Cord Trauma - Among The Most Serious Of Accident Injuries
Your spinal cord is one of the most essential parts of your body. It’s a thick bundle of nerves that link your brain to the rest of your body, and it’s protected by a set of loops in your vertebrae. These bones go a long way towards keeping your spinal cord safe, but if they get hit with enough force they can break or dislocate, and this can then damage or break the spinal cord.
Your neck is particularly vulnerable. The neck has a lot of mobility so you can look around you, the neck vertebrae are relatively small, and the spinal cord is thick since it meets the brain at the base of your skull. If you stop moving too quickly your head can snap around, and that sudden movement can damage your spinal cord without doing anything to the bones that are supposed to protect it.
Out of the top ten list of spinal cord injuries, four are directly related to street traffic. They include pedestrians hit by moving vehicles, bicyclists who either fall off their bikes or get hit by larger vehicles, motorcyclists who go through the same thing at higher speeds, and car passengers and drivers. In fact, auto accidents are the leading cause of spinal cord injuries in both men and women by far.
Other causes include falling down, gun-related injuries, and accidents caused by diving deep into shallow water. Some of these causes tend to result in worse injuries than whiplash, but that doesn’t stop auto accidents from being the most consistent cause.
The spinal cord is a unique part of your anatomy. There’s not much you can do without it, as anyone paralyzed below the neck can tell you. And while the spinal cord can slowly heal over time, you may have to live with a serious and persistent injury for a very long time.
A serious spinal cord injury can leave you paraplegic or quadriplegic, unable to move your legs or arms, but even a minor injury can have some permanent consequences. Damage to the anterior cord can harm your ability to move and feel things with your hands, and central cord damage can reduce your ability to control your fingers, legs, or even your bladder. Then there’s something called Brown-Sequard syndrome, a spinal-cord injury that makes it hard to use one half of your body while the other half keeps working fine.
Aside from paralysis, spinal-cord injuries also result in symptoms like:
• Chronic pain
• Mood swings
Adjusting To A New Life
Sadly, there isn’t much medical science can do about spinal-cord injuries. Sometimes a bad-looking case heals all the way up within a few months. Sometimes a mild case of whiplash results in migraines for the rest of someone’s life. Surgery can sometimes help, but even that is far from being a cure. The best thing to do is to help the injured person adjust to his or her new life and be as supportive as possible.
Since roadside accidents account for so many spinal cord injuries, there’s something else you might want to do: get the insurance policy number of the person responsible for the accident (or your own if you have personal injury protection insurance) and make a claim for the serious amount of care and physical therapy you’ll need.
So if you suffer a spinal cord injury in southwest Florida, you should contact the law offices of Shapiro, Goldman, Babboni, Fernandez, and Walsh. Our attorneys have years of experience representing people injured in vehicle accidents, and we can make sure that you get the fair compensation you deserve.