When you become injured in an auto accident, your life can turn upside down very quickly. Your medical expenses can skyrocket at precisely the time when your income tanks because you’re laid up in the hospital and unable to work. This is exactly why you need the advice, counsel and representation of an experienced car accident lawyer to help you recover these costs and losses.
Injury Types
Unfortunately, an auto accident can result in serious injuries that could affect you for the rest of your life. Here are just a few examples.
Traumatic Brain Injuries
If your head hits a hard surface during your crash, or a piece of flying debris strikes it, you could very well sustain a traumatic brain injury. These types of serious head injuries could have any number of devastating consequences, such as the following:
- Vision impairment, up to and including complete blindness
- Hearing impairment, up to and including complete deafness
- Speech impairment
- Balance, coordination and mobility impairment
- Cognitive and memory impairment
In addition, TBIs are notorious for causing decreased emotional control, resulting in your experiencing sudden bouts of anger or rage that distress and can even endanger your family.
Spinal Cord Injuries
If you receive a neck or back injury during your crash, the result could be a spinal cord injury. These types of injuries can cause paralysis to every part of your body below your point of injury.
The most common type of SCI causes paraplegia, the loss of your ability to feel sensation and to voluntarily move your legs, feet and the lower portion of your torso, requiring you to use a wheelchair to get around.
Quadriplegia is an even more devastating result of an SCI. Here your loss of ability to feel sensation and to voluntarily move extends to virtually your entire body, requiring the necessity of receiving constant care from others.
Crush Injuries
A crush injury occurs when one or more of your body parts become trapped between two hard surfaces during your crash. Your legs are most at risk for sustaining a crush injury, but other parts of your body can also become crushed. Often these types of injuries cause so much damage to the affected body part that the crushed limb must be amputated.
Broken or Fractured Bones
If one or more of your bones becomes broken or fractured during your crash, you could be in for a very long recovery period, starting with surgery to put it or them back together by means of plates or screws.
Burn Injuries
Perhaps no auto accident injury is more painful or requires a longer recovery period than a severe burn. Not only do you face weeks, if not months, in the burn unit undergoing debridement and plastic surgery, but you also face the possibility of lasting disfiguring scars in the affected areas of your body.
Severe Cuts and Lacerations
During a crash, flying glass shards and other sharp objects can easily penetrate virtually any part of your body, causing massive bleeding that could become life-threatening.
Organ Damage
If one or more of your internal organs, such as your liver, kidneys, spleen or stomach, sustains injury in your crash, you may not even realize it because no surface blood appears. Nevertheless, these types of injuries can cause massive internal bleeding that quickly becomes life-threatening.
Soft Tissue Injuries
Finally, auto accidents almost invariably cause injury to your body’s soft tissues. While whiplash may be the first thing you think of, other strains, sprains and tears to your muscles and ligaments can result not only in severe pain, but also in a substantial range of motion decrease in the affected areas.
Possible Compensation
Given the often astronomical medical costs associated with auto accident injuries, the first reason why you consider contacting an experienced car crash attorney probably is your desire to recover these costs, plus those associated with your loss of income, from the person or entity that caused the crash.
Actually, your car accident lawyer can help you seek two kinds of damages in a personal injury lawsuit: economic and noneconomic.
Economic Damages
Economic damages include both your medical expenses and your loss of income, not only current, but ongoing in the future.
Medical Expenses
As their name implies, your medical expenses include all costs associated with treatment for your injuries, including the following:
- Transport from the accident scene to a hospital by whatever method
- Emergency room treatment and assessment
- Hospital treatment, including surgery
- Prescription drugs
Your medical expenses also include a reasonable estimate of the costs you will face in the future as a result of your auto accident injuries. These costs may be for such things as rehabilitation, physical therapy, ongoing doctor appointments, and any medical equipment your injuries require you to purchase.
Loss of Income
The other part of your economic damages relates to the amount of income you lose during your initial hospitalization and into the future. For instance, if you suffer a disabling injury and cannot return to the job you had prior to your accident, your loss of income can include the difference between what you earned at your original job and what you can earn at a new job, assuming your injuries allow you to work at all.
Noneconomic Damages
You probably noticed that your economic damages do not include anything related to your pain and suffering. That is because these are part of your noneconomic damages, that is, losses due to your injuries for which you do not receive an actual bill.
In addition to pain and suffering, your noneconomic damages include such things as the following:
- Emotional distress and mental anguish
- Embarrassment over any disfiguring scars resulting from your accident
- Loss of identity if your injuries require you to now use a wheelchair, prosthesis or other medical devise for purposes of mobility
- Loss of your pre-accident enjoyment of life
As with economic damages, your noneconomic damages include both your current psychological losses and a reasonable estimate of those you will encounter in the future.
Choosing Your Auto Accident Lawyer
At Cellino Law, we want to be your auto accident attorney of choice. Personal injury law, including that related to auto accidents, is all we practice, and we are proud to say that we do it well. We serve the entire state of New York, and our compassionate and experienced accident attorneys are known for their aggressive representation of injured clients. To date we have obtained more than $2 billion in settlements and jury awards on their behalf. We stand ready, willing and able to help you, too.
You may be assured that your Cellino Law lawyer will give you the superior attention and service that you seek.. You are never just a number or another case with us. We treat you with the respect, dignity and compassion that you deserve. We will always keep you up to date on the progress and status of your case, and you can always reach us whenever you have a question. In other words, we are here to help you when you most need our help.
So contact Cellino Law today. Your initial consultation is free, and we are eager to get to work on your behalf. Furthermore, we never charge you an attorney’s fee unless and until we successfully resolve your case.