Fort Collins Car Accident: Delayed Injury Symptoms

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Fort Collins Car Accident Lawyer:

Delayed Injury Symptoms After a Car Accident

Days – or perhaps even weeks or longer – have passed since your Fort Collins car accident. Your car has been repaired, but your own personal injury struggles are just beginning. Perhaps you notice some increasing stiffness in your joints in the morning or while you are driving into work. Perhaps instead you find yourself becoming strangely and unexplainably ill. There is no other plausible explanation in your mind other than your signs and symptoms must be attributable to the car accident. What should you do and, more importantly, is compensation available to you?

The Difficulty with Delayed Injury Symptoms

It is not uncommon for you to suffer injuries in a car accident that you are not aware of until the adrenaline that courses through you during and immediately after the car crash wears off. This is why it is vitally important that car crash injury victims seek out medical evaluation from a doctor, emergency room, or other qualified professional as soon as possible after their crash, even if the victim feels fine or does not believe he or she was injured. There are two challenges that are present whenever an injury victim seeks compensation for injuries that did not manifest immediate symptoms:

• It can be difficult to show a connection between the car crash and the injuries. In order to receive compensation for one’s injuries sustained in a Fort Collins car crash, the injury victim must show that the injuries he or she suffered were caused by the negligence of the other person who caused the accident. The more time that elapses between the date of the crash and the onset of symptoms and signs, the more challenging it becomes to establish that necessary causal link. You may need expert testimony to opine as to the nature of your injury and how it was – or was not – exacerbated by any events or activities that took place after the car crash.
• Your time to file a car crash lawsuit may have expired. In extreme cases, you may not be able to determine that your injuries and/or illness is connected to your car crash until the statute of limitations has expired. In Fort Collins and all of Colorado, car accident injury victims have three years from the date they were injured or should have known they were injured in which to file their case. Unless you can show the court that you could not have reasonably known you were injured until after the date of your car accident, you may not be able to file a lawsuit to obtain compensation. In other words, the court must find that you took reasonable steps to determine whether you were injured during the three years after the accident and that even having taken these steps it was still not reasonably possible for you to know you were injured until the date the symptoms began manifesting. (Incidentally, this is the reason why car accident attorneys implore their clients to see a doctor or go to the hospital as soon as possible after a car crash and follow any orders or reasonable recommendations they make. This simple act is one of the simplest ways to show a court that you acted reasonably in trying to determine if you were injured in a car crash.)

How a Fort Collins Car Accident Lawyer Can Help

Zinda Law Group is a personal injury law firm representing those who have been injured in a car crash. Contact us right away if you or a loved one have been involved in a car accident. We can help guide and direct your next steps so that you protect your physical wellbeing and safeguard your legal rights in the event that injury symptoms later develop. Call us today at (970) 549-2138.