Baltimore Injury

When someone else is negligent, they can cause an accident that ends with you getting seriously hurt. While the injuries you suffer can be minor–like a bump or a bruise, or severe or even fatal–they all have several things in common: they were caused by someone else, happened through no fault of your own, and you were often powerless to prevent them from happening. It would be unfair to expect you to pay for the costs of the accident and your recovery.

The personal injury lawyers at Gilman & Bedigian in Baltimore can help you if you have been hurt because of someone else’s negligence or poor conduct. With our legal representation, you can fight for the compensation you need and deserve. Contact us online.

Types of Injuries You Can Suffer in Baltimore

There are lots of ways that you can get hurt in an accident – whether the accident is a car crash, a slip and fall in a store, medical malpractice, or a dog bite. In fact, every type of accident comes with its own typical injuries. Dog bites tend to lead to laceration injuries, while a car accident is more likely to cause a broken bone or whiplash.

In all, though, there are some injuries that are more common than others, while some other injuries are so severe that, even though they are rare, are worth delving into.

Broken Bones

One of the most common injuries that you can suffer in an accident in Baltimore is a broken bone. Broken bones are particularly common in the following situations.

Motorcycle accidents
Bicycle accidents
Car accidents
Slip and falls

These types of accidents, after all, involve lots of force and blunt force trauma directly to your body. In many cases, this trauma lands directly on your arm, leg, or torso, leading to broken hands, wrists, arms, elbows, legs, feet, or ribs. Depending on the accident, certain bones are more likely to break than others.

Slip and falls tend to lead to broken hands. People walking down the sidewalk or an aisle in a grocery store when they hit a patch or ice or something slippery on the floor and lose their balance are likely to throw their hand out to break their imminent fall. While this can reduce the impact on the rest of their body, it frequently leads to a broken hand.
Bike accidents tend to lead to broken wrists. Similarly, bikers who get hit by a car or lose their balance from a poor road condition tend to use their hands to break their fall. The additional speed of their cycling, however, often makes the resulting contact on their hands more serious and often leads to a broken wrist.
Motorcycle accidents tend to lead to broken legs. Motorcyclists have little protection from oncoming cars. When the collision comes from the side, the force pins a biker’s leg between the car and motorcycle. This often leads to a broken leg, foot, or hip, and often causes knee injuries, as well.

Loss of Limb Injuries

Amputation injuries are far more common than one would expect, though not all of them involve the loss of an entire arm or leg – many amputation injuries sustained in accidents only involve a finger or toe. Regardless of the limb lost, though, these injuries are traumatic, serious, and difficult to recover from.

Workplace accidents, particularly construction accidents, are among the most common culprits for a loss of limb in the Baltimore area. Dealing with heavy machinery every day and struggling to complete projects on schedule can quickly lead to negligent conduct. If you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, you can be the one who suffers.

Burn injuries are also common causes of a loss of limb. Severe burns can compromise muscles and tissues in your extremities to such an extent that healing is impossible.

Loss of Vision

Another terrible injury to suffer is the loss of your vision, especially when the loss is complete rather than just partial. Going blind because of someone else’s negligence can be one of the worst things that can happen to you.

Vision loss can generally happen in one of two situations: after a traumatic brain injury and after direct eye trauma.

Traumatic brain injuries involve contact to your brain. Depending on the area of your brain that has been affected by the impact, your ability to see can become compromised. This can cause

Blurred vision
Light sensitivity
Problems with depth perception
Blindness

More disturbing, though, are instances of vision loss from direct eye trauma. These are injuries directly to your eyes and typically involve an external object scraping, penetrating, or even impaling your eye. A sudden exposure to extreme amounts of light can also be bad enough to cause vision loss, as well.

Nerve Damage

Yet another serious injury that you can suffer in Baltimore is nerve damage, which can happen whenever your nervous system is compromised or a nerve gets severed. This can happen in a variety of circumstances.

Medical malpractice. One of the most common situations can lead to nerve damage is medical malpractice. Doctors can cause nerve damage if they prescribe drugs haphazardly in ways that alter the ways that you feel pain or other emotions. This can cause lasting damage to how your nerves work. Surgeons can also cause nerve damage during an internal procedure or surgery if they make even the tiniest slip.
Motor vehicle accidents. Some of the most severe motor vehicle accidents can cause nerve damage if your back, neck, or head are hurt. Your nervous system runs through these parts of your body so injuries can also implicate your nerves and damage them.

Back and Neck Injuries

Back and neck injuries are not just debilitating because of how often they implicate your nervous system; they are also severe in their own right. Traumatic injuries from car accidents or slip and fall injuries can break or fracture the vertebrae in your back or neck, which can cause long-term debilitations that make it difficult to do the things you most enjoy in life. Additionally, repetitive motion injuries that are common in the workplace can strain your back or lead to disc problems, like slipped, ruptured, or herniated discs that can make it difficult to move much, if at all.

In the worst cases, you can suffer a spinal cord injury that can cause nerve damage, as well. These are among the worst kinds of injuries that you can suffer in an accident in Baltimore because the disabilities that spinal cord injuries cause are often permanent.

Injuries to Pregnant Women

Accident victims who are pregnant can suffer injuries that implicate their unborn baby. This is especially true in accidents that involve a sudden impact or relatively large amounts of trauma, like car crashes.

Accidents like these can hurt an unborn baby in a variety of ways, many of which are difficult to detect while the baby is in utero.

Birth defects
Concussion
Development delays

Any one of these can drastically reduce the quality of life that your baby can expect, making injuries like these very severe.

Additionally, pregnant women who are involved in an accident can suffer injuries that others would likely not experience, like high blood pressure or preeclampsia, that can cause complications when they go into labor.

In the worst cases, pregnant women can suffer a miscarriage as a direct result of an accident.

Injuries to Children

Even after a child is born, the injuries that they can suffer in an accident in Baltimore are different from what an adult can suffer. These differences stem from children being smaller than adults, so they are less able to withstand force or trauma without being hurt. Because their bodies are still developing, a serious injury can implicate their growth.

A surprisingly common source of an injury to a child in Baltimore is a defective product, like a toy. Children are less able to notice problems with the things they use on a daily basis and are more likely to use something in ways that it was not designed. This makes children more likely to get hurt if the product breaks.

Because this is still entirely foreseeable to anyone who has been around children, you can recover compensation for your child’s injuries in a products liability case that can let them live a whole life in spite of the setback.

Post Traumatic Stress

Not all injuries that you can suffer in an accident in Baltimore are physical. Some are mental and emotional but are no less severe or debilitating as a physical injury.

Post traumatic stress is one of those injuries.

After a particularly traumatizing accident or injury, you can suffer post traumatic stress syndrome, which can include your mind replaying the sights and sounds of the incident over and over again. These scenes can be so riveting and real that they trigger the “fight or flight” response in your mind, making it incredibly difficult to live your day-to-day life. While these memories are a mental issue, they can quickly turn into physical problems if your post traumatic stress prevents you from sleeping or relaxing.

Whiplash

Perhaps the most common injury that you can suffer in an accident in Baltimore – particularly car accidents and slip and fall accidents – is whiplash. Whiplash is a strain of the muscles and tendons in your core or back, though little is fully known about the condition beyond those basic facts. What is known, though, is that whiplash can be very serious and debilitating because of how often we use the muscles and tendons that are often implicated by an instance of whiplash.

For victims of whiplash, basic movements can become incredibly difficult and very painful – even turning your head from side to side can be terribly painful.

Unfortunately, because so little is known about whiplash in the medical community, defense lawyers fight aggressively against claims that you are suffering from whiplash. Having a skilled personal injury lawyer at your side can be essential if you have whiplash and need compensation for the losses you have suffered from it.

Chronic Pain

Similarly, little is known about chronic pain, either. Chronic pain is typically defined by doctors as pain that has an unknown source or that has lasted longer than medically expected. With so little to go on, treating chronic pain can be incredibly difficult. Doctors facing it make use of the trial-and-error method more often than not.

What is not mysterious about chronic pain is how painful it can be. Whether it is intense and rare, or dull but continuous, chronic pain is debilitating and can keep you from doing the activities that you most enjoyed in life. Nevertheless, convincing other people that the pain you are feeling is legitimate can be very difficult. Having a lawyer on your side to present your case to a jury can be the best way to ensure you get the compensation you need and deserve.

Baltimore Personal Injury Lawyers at Gilman & Bedigian

The personal injury lawyers at the law office of Gilman & Bedigian in Baltimore can represent you if you have been hurt in any of these ways after an accident in the city or surrounding area. When someone else acts negligently and you are the one who gets hurt, it is only fair for them to cover the costs of their poor conduct. We are the lawyers who can represent you in and out of court to make sure this happens. By filing a personal injury lawsuit on your behalf, we can initiate the process of recovering the compensation and reimbursement that you deserve.