Sometimes the Extent of Your Injuries Don’t Show up for Months
One of the most common injuries after a car wreck has to do with the spine. The back, the neck, and all of those joints in there have the potential to create serious injuries. Often, these injuries aren’t fully understood immediately following the wreck.
After a wreck, your back might hurt. It was tweaked, twisted, and otherwise put out of whack. But the real issue isn’t the back pain. It comes up two weeks later when the pain shoots down through your legs. Then a couple months later when your toes start to tingle and go numb. A couple of months after that and your legs are feeling weak, catching your toes as you walk up the stairs. It feels like your foot isn’t following the instructions that you’re giving to it. Suddenly that back pain isn’t really an issue anymore, and now you’re wondering,
“Why am I getting worse, instead of better?”
The Car Crash Captainv explores why back pain is the first symptom of something deeper and more insidious that could cause serious issues weeks, or even months, later.
Your Disc Isn’t Slipped – it’s Getting on Your Nerves
Before we get into this, we’ll clear up the terminology. Your disc isn’t “slipped,” it’s herniated. Basically, what has happened is that the material from the soft center of your spine has pushed through the tough exterior that contains it. Now, it’s pressing on the nerves next to your spine causing pain, numbness, tingling, and weakness. That herniated disc is literally getting on your nerves.
If this happens, you’re actually hit with two problems compounding the pain and discomfort. Your disc is herniated, and it’s physically compressing against the nerve. When something is wrong in the body, the natural reaction is to trigger inflammation responses. This inflammation causes more physical pressure, but also the chemical inflammation can cause stress on the nerve itself.
What it boils down to is that your herniated disc can hurt a nerve twice: with pressure and with inflammation.
Pain is Tolerable; Losing Function is Something Else
The pain gets your attention; it’s the body’s immediate reaction to something being wrong. But when you start to experience weakness, then you should really start paying attention. It doesn’t always take this course, but your back injury can go from pain, to tingling, to numbness, to weakness, to loss of function.
Progressive neurological deficits are very different from lingering soreness, and they have to be treated very differently.
The insurance adjuster will look at a snapshot of what’s going on immediately following the wreck. Almost all of what they’ll see is a simple concept: you have back pain.
But if you’re experiencing back pain now, you have to ensure that it’s not going to progress to something even more serious. An MRI and a neurological exam can reveal that your back pain is from a herniated disc, and that herniated disc is affecting a nerve root. If untreated, this can lead to progressive weakness.
A sore back and the potential for progressive weakness and paralysis are two very different injuries.
Your Injury Could Lead to Paralysis
There are two different ways that a herniated disc can lead to even worse problems. It largely depends on where the injury has occurred.
A cervical disc, that’s one in your neck, can compress the spinal cord itself and lead to what is called cervical myelopathy. This condition can progress from tingling, to weakness, to numbness to difficulty using the hands, difficulty walking, and bowel and bladder dysfunction. Ultimately, if it’s still left without treatment, paralysis can occur.
Lower down in the spine, things are quite different. A herniated disc here is less likely to compress those nerves due to how the nerve roots are situated in the spine. This means it’s less likely to progress beyond pain and tingling, but it still could progress.
What it boils down to is that some herniated discs won’t paralyze you, but saying it’s just a slipped disc is a dangerous way to oversimplify and injury that can end up compressing the spinal cord and causing serious and permanent damage.
Herbert Law Group Knows What to Expect
It’s not about the wreck where someone asks, “Does your back hurt?” But rather, “What happened to that injured disc, and the neural structures around it?” It’s a question that only the right doctors will know to ask, and know how to answer. And unless you have a knowledgeable Texas car crash lawyer on your side, those questions might not even be asked.
Were you injured in a wreck? Are you experiencing back pain? If so, we need to talk. Call our offices at 214-314-2808, or fill out our contact form, and we’ll have a free conversation to determine how we can help and what the next steps are.