Were you in an accident, and your injury is “just a cut?” It’s funny how when we cut ourselves, people look at the injury as minor, like it’s just a small scratch. In reality, lacerations can be painful, and even debilitating, if they are bad enough and severe enough.
Lacerations are a sad reality in any kind of accident, and you don’t have to be exposed to any kind of sharp edge or knife blade to get cut.
How Laceration Accidents Happen
Have you seen what a car looks like when there is even moderate damage to it after an accident? The car’s interior and exterior crumples, and that can create sharp, jagged edges. People are often extracted from their cars and onto the ground, where the pavement can cause lacerations.
Even a crushing injury can cause a laceration; an arm that is lodged between a part of the car that has crushed in can cause skin tearing as it is pulled in different directions. And it doesn’t take much to get a laceration; your bones are solid, but your skin is not, and any type of pulling or crushing injury can tear the skin, even if the bone ends up being just fine.
Other, Hidden Dangers
Lacerations can have a double danger: the laceration itself, and also the way that a laceration can be compounded by other conditions that can make an otherwise small or innocuous laceration, much worse.
For example, two people can have the same kind of laceration, but if one has a blood disorder or peripheral artery disease, that person can find even a small cut becomes a major medical problem. There are even stories of small lacerations (like the ones that may be sustained at a spa or nail salon) leading to complete amputations.
How Big or Severe?
Lacerations can be deceiving because we can only visibly observe how long the laceration is—not how deep. Deep lacerations can end up affecting nerves; even if the skin heals, feeling may never return at the site of the laceration.
And lacerations can be pretty severe. People dragged on a roadway (for example, after being ejected from a car), can find their skin is peeled away. What are known as “degloving” injuries are where the skin completely comes or peels off a finger or limb.
Lacerations can also lead to loss of blood, which can be deadly, as can the shock; the body, to protect itself, lowers the body’s blood pressure, and it may do that to a dangerous, life-threatening level.
Long-term scarring can be severe, and for areas exposed, like our faces or heads or limbs, the psychological devastation of the loss of our physical appearance to some degree, is something a jury can consider, and compensate victims for.
