How Are Internal Injuries Diagnosed After an Accident?

After your car accident, slip and fall, or other personal injury accident, you may not see any visible injuries or feel hurt at all. However, what you may not realize just yet is that the impact of this accident may have caused damage to your body internally. Oftentimes, this is considered the most serious injury, as it may rapidly worsen without immediate aid. With all that being said, please continue reading to learn how your internal injuries can get officially diagnosed after your accident, and how an experienced Monmouth County personal injury attorney at Wilton Law Firm can help you get the medical attention you need for the sake of your physical health and future legal claim. 

What symptoms might suggest internal injuries after an accident?

First of all, internal injuries refer to damage inside the body as opposed to on the skin’s surface. For example, after a car accident, the sheer force of the collision may have caused you to puncture a lung, rupture your spleen, or incur abdominal trauma. And so, internal injuries may involve organs, blood vessels, muscles, and bones, and include conditions such as internal bleeding, organ damage, or traumatic brain injury.

Further, internal injuries are not always visible immediately after an accident. Because of this, they may become life-threatening if they are not diagnosed right away. Therefore, you may help yourself by monitoring yourself for any signs that indicate you are not 100 percent healthy. That said, symptoms commonly associated with internal injuries may consist of the following:

• Abdominal symptoms: pain, tenderness, swelling, or rigidity in the abdomen.
• Cardiovascular symptoms: low blood pressure or a rapid, weak pulse. 
• General symptoms: fatigue, lightheadedness, dizziness, or unexplained pain.
• Neurological symptoms: severe headaches, seizures, or a momentary loss of consciousness.
• Respiratory symptoms: shortness of breath, coughing up blood, or blood in stool or urine.
• Skin symptoms: deep purple bruising or large, expanding bruising around the belly button.

How are internal injuries diagnosed after a personal injury accident?

Even if you do not believe you are experiencing any of the aforementioned symptoms, it is highly advisable to seek professional medical help immediately after your personal injury accident. This is because symptoms may take days, not just hours, to arise. So the last thing you may want is to experience irreversible damage to your body because it is already too late. 

And so, when you visit an emergency room, an attending physician may conduct a physical examination and check for pain, tenderness, swelling, or rigidity in the abdomen. Even if this all checks out, after learning the nature of your accident, they may order further testing for good measure. Namely, you may be asked to submit to ultrasound imaging (i.e., FAST scan), CT scans, and MRI scans. 

After all this, you may receive your official diagnosis for an internal injury. Follow-up care is, of course, important at this stage. But also, you must collect this diagnosis record and all other medical test results and medical procedure documentation along the way to utilize for your future personal injury claim. 

At Wilton Law Firm, we treat every case with kid gloves, and you will notice this upon your initial phone call. So please do not hesitate to allow a skilled Monmouth County personal injury attorney to represent you in your upcoming case.