Being involved in any kind of a motor vehicle accident can be painful, to say the least, but closed-head trauma and spinal cord damage can be some of the worst and long-lasting injuries sustained by victims of passenger car and commercial truck wrecks. As Maryland automobile accident attorneys, I and my legal staff understand the extent of the pain and suffering victims of car, truck, bus or pedestrian traffic collisions can experience.
Whether one is hurt in a traffic collision here in the Baltimore area, over in Rockville or across in Washington, D.C., the potential long-term effects of a closed-head or spine injury can be daunting to families with limited means. Even those people who have good-paying jobs can end up losing their income due to an extended hospital stay, or worse, permanent disability and incapacitation. Lost wages, hospital emergency room treatments, rehab costs and long-term nursing care can each be a costly component of a serious injury accident.
Take, for instance, closed-head trauma; in the case of injuries sustained by a victim’s brain, the effects following that initial injury can range from concussion and brain contusions to bleeding within the brain itself. Unfortunately, unlike open-head wounds, which typically result in obvious signs of physical trauma — such as loss of consciousness, interrupted breathing, and bleeding – the effects of a closed-head injury can often be much more difficult to detect and treat right after the accident. For traumatic brain injury associated with a closed-head incident, the symptoms may be as simple as a slight headache to a possibly more noticeable telltale signs such as dizziness, tired feeling, impaired memory, nausea or vomiting, among others.
When it comes to headaches, these can many times result from a number of injuries, but most often following a closed-head or traumatic neck injury. For example, the victims of car, truck and motorcycle collisions who sustain a “whiplash” type of injury may also complain of a persistent headache or succession of headaches. Usually associated with a soft tissue injury, numerous studies have found that upward of 80 percent or more people involved in rear-end collisions have reported headache symptoms following the initial incident.
Nationwide automobile accident statistics show that more than one million Americans suffer some kind of traumatic brain injury every year. In fact, on average, hospital ERs all over the country treat about 1.3 million individuals annually for brain injuries; and more than 250,000 people are actually hospitalized following a closed-head injury accident each year. Of these, more than 50,000 people die because some kind of severe closed-head trauma every 12 months.
Naturally, nobody would prefer the alternative to being hospitalized; that of becoming one of the thousands of fatal statistics on the ledgers of police and safety agencies nationwide. A lifetime being saddled with paralysis of one or more limbs is not a pleasant thought, but neither is being involved in a senseless and possibly preventable car or truck crash. Yet these kinds of incidents happen all too frequently here in Maryland, as well as all across the United State.
According to news reports, a man was taken to the local hospital emergency room following a car crash that sent a car slamming into the side of a residence in Carroll County, MD, not too long ago. Based on police reports, a single-car accident resulted in two people being hurt when their vehicle apparently went out of control, left the road and hit a nearby home along a stretch of Black Schoolhouse Rd. near Westminster.
The collision, which took place on a Tuesday afternoon around 3pm, involved a Chevy station wagon being driven by a 30-year-old out-of-state man and one 29-year-old passenger from the Maryland area. Police reports indicated that the driver was treated at the scene by emergency response personnel and then transported to University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center. The passenger, a resident of Taneytown, MD, who received what authorities described as “non-life-threatening” injuries, was taken to Carroll Hospital Center for treatment of his less serious injuries. At the time of the news article, it was not clear if the crash was due to driver error, or possibly caused by a mechanical failure of one of the vehicle’s critical safety systems.
Man Sent to Shock Trauma After Crashing Car into House, Patch.com, September 25, 2012