How Delayed Brain Injury Symptoms Can Affect Your Oklahoma Injury Claim

After a serious accident, you may feel relieved if you are able to drive home afterwards without any serious injuries. But it’s important to recognize that your relief may be short-lived. Some injuries, including traumatic brain injuries, often take hours or even days to show up. By the time a victim is able to recognize that something’s wrong, they may have already chosen not to seek medical treatment, told the other party’s insurance company that they aren’t seeking compensation, or accepted a lowball settlement.

If you’ve been involved in an Oklahoma car accident, you must protect your right to seek medical care and fight for compensation. Delayed brain injury symptoms may complicate your personal injury claim, but you don’t have to let those symptoms derail your entire claim. Call Biby Law Firm to set up a time to meet with our traumatic brain injury lawyers.

Common delayed symptoms of a brain injury

In the wake of a car accident, knowing the warning signs of a brain injury can help you identify issues earlier, seek medical care promptly, and protect your right to file a claim against the responsible party. While many of these symptoms do appear fairly quickly after an accident, they may be delayed by hours or days. This is often due to the adrenaline surge that happens after an accident. During a major threat, the body releases a flood of adrenaline to block your pain receptors and give you the strength needed to get away from the threat. This means that you may feel fine, but you’re actually in worse shape than you know. When the adrenaline wears off, you may be left battling symptoms like:

• Headaches that worsen with time
• Memory problems
• Difficulty concentrating, also referred to as brain fog
• Sensitivity to light or noise
• Sleeping too much or too little
• Increased irritability or other unusual mood changes
• Personality changes
• Dizziness and other balance problems
• Nausea and vomiting
• Seizures

It’s important to note that these symptoms may look a little different in children. Children may exhibit the warning signs above as well as several others that are unique to kids. These include a loss of previously acquired skills, changes in play patterns and preferences, and elevated fussiness. If your child is involved in an accident, you should be as tuned in as possible to their behavior patterns afterwards.

Why delayed symptoms pose a legal challenge

Unfortunately, even though delayed injury symptoms are fairly normal for brain injuries, they can still make it much harder for victims like you to recover fair compensation. When an insurance company receives an accident report for an accident their client caused, they want to get it squared away as quickly as possible. They know that the longer they wait to settle it, the more likely it is that the victim will uncover new injuries and expenses related to the accident—and that means the cost of the collision goes up.

If you don’t notice that you’re experiencing brain injury symptoms until days after the crash, odds are good that you’ve already spoken to the other party’s insurance provider by that point. You may have told them that you feel fine, that you have no symptoms outside of a headache, or that you’re not interested in seeking medical care. When you come back and say that you’re actually experiencing chronic headaches and memory loss, they may point back to your original statement and ask what changed.

Insurance companies are always looking for ways to save money, and delayed symptoms give them an easy way to do that. They might argue that the injury isn’t as serious as you now claim, otherwise you would have reported it earlier. They could ask how they know the injury is accident-related, as anything could have happened between your initial report and your updated report on your injuries.

The insurance adjuster may also insinuate that you are partially to blame for your injuries because you didn’t seek treatment earlier. If they can successfully prove that your injuries would have benefited from earlier treatment, they may be able to limit how much they have to pay.

The importance of medical evaluations and documentation

This is why it is so important to get checked out by a medical professional as soon as possible after an accident. Even if you feel fine and a medical checkup seems like a waste of time, an early checkup could catch injuries immediately. Early detection can benefit your health and your personal injury claim.

If symptoms develop over time, it’s important to document them and report them to your medical care provider as soon as possible. Early medical care establishes a baseline of what is considered normal for you, making it much easier to detect losses in function over time.

Additionally, prompt medical care can link the injury to the accident. Even if you don’t yet know the severity of an injury, having it documented from the very beginning makes it much harder for the insurance company to deny that it’s related to the accident. This protects your credibility and gives the insurance company less incentive to go through your story looking for holes they can exploit.

If you’re told you’ve sustained a head or brain injury, it’s crucial that you meet with a traumatic brain injury lawyer as soon as possible. These cases can be very complex, and an experienced lawyer can help you fight for the compensation you are owed.

Don’t take on the insurance company alone—choose Biby Law Firm for your traumatic brain injury claim

At Biby Law Firm, we understand the nuances and complexities of traumatic brain injury claims. Let’s talk about your next steps and potential compensation. Contact us online or call us right away.