There’s More Than One Injury For Slipping & Falling
Brian O Sutter
Premises Liability
To some it is considered just a punchline in a joke, or an excuse by greedy people to exploit insurance money from honest businesses and homeowners. But others, slipping and falling in a home or public space is not just a clumsy, embarrassing mishap, it can have very real medical repercussions that can affect a person for months, years, or even permanently. Slipping and falling while out in public or visiting someone else might not seem like such a serious incident, especially when compared to something more dramatic like a car accident. But the human body has a lot of vulnerabilities, and a slip and fall accident can cause a variety of different medical problems depending on the type and severity of fall.Soft Tissue Damage
This is the type of injury that can sometimes be very difficult to detect because it doesn’t show up on x-rays. If you get a sprained muscle, or even tear a tendon or ligament, initial medical diagnoses may miss this, especially if the true extent of damage only becomes known in the days or weeks following the injury. Because these are your muscles that are injured, however, it has a big effect on your ability to perform your normal physical tasks.
Broken Bones
This is far more obvious, and is the type of injury that shows up immediately in an x-ray examination. Broken bones may be smaller, such as hairline fractures that indicate a “crack” in the bone that may develop into something more serious, or it can be a complete break. Depending on the age of the person, and the severity of the injury, this may be recovered from in weeks, or may require extensive reconstructive surgery to restore any kind of mobility.
Spinal Cord Damage
Your spinal cord is essentially a bundle of “nerve cables” that runs up and down the height of your body. A slip and fall may cause the bones of your back to compress, or, in some instances, actually sever the spinal cord at a certain point, meaning signals to issue orders to those parts of the body are no longer possible. Spinal cord damage may require physiotherapy to recover from, or, in the worst case scenarios, permanent paralysis.
Brain Damage
If a slip and fall results in an impact to the head, then there is always a risk of potential damage to the brain, which is arguably the most important organ in the body, since it not only controls all other organs, but is the “seat” of memories, emotions and the ability to think. Traumatic brain injury can run the gamut of possible side-effects from emotional consequences like increased anxiety and depression, to dementia, and even seizures, or loss of motor control.
This is why if you slip and fall, it’s always better to play it safe and get a diagnosis from a doctor. If the diagnosis reveals that you’ve sustained some verified injury, such as a traumatic brain injury, or broken bones, and you slipped and fell because of a poorly maintained property, get some legal help in pursuing a premises liability case.