Why Is Pain Often Delayed After An Injury?

It is often said that pain after you suffer an injury might be immediate–but it also might take hours, if not days, for you to feel pain (or at least, to feel the full effect of the pain). It would seem that if you get injured after an accident that you would feel that pain right away. So why don’t you?

Adrenaline in Your Body

The first reason is adrenaline–that feeling of being “spiked” that you might have experienced when you’re nervous, scared, or before a stressful or important event. That chemical has the effect of masking pain and actually numbs the pain receptors in your body.

This is an adaptive response; your body wants you focusing on the perceived danger at hand, and not worried about pain. It can take hours for the adrenaline to wear off, which is when you begin to feel the full amount of pain from your injuries.

Inflammation Can be Slow

Have you ever bumped into something, and it hurts, but you only get a bruise hours, or even a day, after the injury? Or have you ever had a sports injury that you continued to play on, and only a day after, the injury starts to really hurt?

These are all caused by inflammation. Inflammation causes pain through swelling, but because it can take a day or more for full inflammation to happen, pain isn’t always immediately perceptible.

Sometimes, after an accident, your tendons or ligaments or other parts of your body sustain very small tears. Those tears by themselves, may not be terribly painful. But the inflammation that comes after those tears, as your body’s defense mechanisms rush to repair and protect the area, are what cause the pain and restricted range of motion.

Internal Bleeds

If you have a small bleed outside your body, you don’t think much of it. You bandage or Band-Aid it, and it eventually stops bleeding and that’s it. But inside your body, such as with internal bleeding, there is nowhere for even a small amount of blood to go.

That means that a very small trickle or stream of blood from an internal injury, may not, at first cause you any pain. It may take time for the slow, small stream of blood from that internal injury to accumulate or pool. When it does, is when you get critical danger, and accompanying pain.

Problems With Delayed Onset Pain

Delayed pain can cause problems for an accident case.

That’s because victims often tell emergency responders that they “are fine,” or else, they downplay their injuries, as they immediately aren’t in any discomfort. They may, in a hospital emergency room, even refuse necessary treatments or scans. The lack of immediate pain, may even delay victims from seeing their own medical providers, thus leading to a delay in care.

Take your injury after an accident seriously, and see how we can help you after your accident. Contact our Rhode Island injury lawyers at Robert E. Craven & Associates.

Source:

memorialspringser.com/post/why-pain-sustained-during-auto-accidents-is-often-delayed