When we think of devastating accidents and traumatic injuries, our minds often go to broken bones and concussions. But some accident injuries may impact the softer parts of your body. These soft tissue injuries can be incredibly painful and may take months or even years to recover from.
If you’ve suffered a soft tissue injury, you could be entitled to compensation. Read on to learn more about these injuries and the settlement you could get.
How Anderson Injury Lawyers Can Help
When you’re hurt in a personal accident, you may wind up feeling scared and alone. You’re trying to recover from your injuries, pay off medical bills, and get back to work. To make matters worse, you may have to fight with your insurance company to get a fair settlement offer.
Anderson Injury Lawyers knows all the dirty tricks insurance companies like to pull to cheat accident victims out of their settlements. We’ll fight to get you full and fair compensation for your injury.
When you hire us, we can
- Assess your claim to make sure it will hold up in court
- Gather evidence, including pulling police reports, reviewing medical records, and talking to witnesses
- Build a solid case to support your claim
- Calculate every dollar you’re owed in damages
- Send a demand letter to the insurance company asking for a fair settlement offer
- Take your case to court if necessary
We’ll fight for your case like it was our own. Schedule a free consultation with us today to start getting the representation you deserve.
What Is a Soft Tissue Injury?
As the name suggests, a soft tissue injury impacts the soft tissues in your body. This can include your muscles, ligaments, and tendons.
There are several types of soft tissue injuries.
- Bruises – These happen when blood vessels burst below the skin. Bruises can be minor or can cause deep tissue compression and massive internal bleeding. You may also hear them called contusions.
- Sprains – A sprain is a partial tear of a ligament and can range in severity. Often, strains can take weeks or months to heal.
- Strains – Strains are injuries to the tendons or ligaments that don’t cause any tearing. Nonetheless, they can be incredibly painful.
- Bursitis – The bursa is a fluid-filled sac that helps to pad your tendons and ligaments from your bones. When it gets inflamed, this condition is called bursitis.
- Tendonitis – Tendonitis is a condition that involves inflammation of your tendons. This is often a repetitive stress injury and may impact the hands, wrists, elbows, shoulders, feet, ankles, knees, or hips.
These injuries can be incredibly painful and may take months to recover from. They can even turn into long-term conditions if the area gets continually re-injured, as often happens with repetitive motion injuries.
Common Causes of Soft Tissue Injuries
There are two ways a soft tissue injury can happen: in an acute incident or in an overuse injury.
Acute injuries may happen in a car accident, a bicycle accident, or a pedestrian accident. You can also sustain an acute soft tissue injury in a fall. These are one-time traumatic events that can cause a wide variety of injuries.
Overuse injuries happen over a long period of time and are often repetitive motion injuries. These may be workplace injuries from doing the same task over and over again. Tendonitis is an especially common overuse injury, especially in the manufacturing industry.
Symptoms of a Soft Tissue Injury
There are several symptoms that can indicate you might have a soft tissue injury. Most of these injuries will cause pain right away, as well as swelling, either at the time of the injury or later on. You may also experience stiffness and bruising at the site of the wound.
In some severe cases, you may experience instability in the injured joint. You might hear a pop or a crack at the time of an acute soft tissue injury, and you may notice a strange lump or deformity. You might also experience tingling or numbness, either at the site of the injury or elsewhere on your body.
Treatment
The best thing you can do to treat a soft tissue injury is to remember PRICE.
- Protect – Do your best to protect the injured area from further damage.
- Rest – Keep weight off the injured limb as much as possible.
- Ice – Ice the injured area for up to twenty minutes at a time.
- Compression – If possible, wrap your injured limb with a compression bandage.
- Elevation – Keep the injured limb elevated to help reduce swelling.
If your symptoms are especially serious or if they don’t improve after a few days, talk to your doctor.
Damages You Can Recover for a Soft Tissue Injury
If you sustained a soft tissue injury in an accident, you could be entitled to compensation. There are three basic types of compensation you may be able to get after a personal injury: economic, non-economic, and punitive.
Economic damages are meant to cover losses that have an inherent financial value. This can include wages you lost during your recovery period, your medical expenses, property damage, loss of future earning potential, and so on.
Non-economic damages help to make amends for losses that may not have a built-in dollar value. These damages may cover pain and suffering, mental anguish, emotional trauma, scarring and disfigurement, loss of enjoyment of life, and more.
Punitive damages have a very high burden of proof and are very rare to recover in personal injury cases. This type of damages is meant to punish a defendant for acting in an especially hideous way during an accident.
Statute of Limitations
In personal injury cases, you have a limited amount of time after an accident to file for compensation. You can’t try to get money for a soft tissue injury that happened fifteen years ago. This time limit is called the statute of limitations, and it varies state to state.
The statute of limitations on personal injury cases in Texas is two years. You’ll have two years from the date of your accident to file a claim. While this may seem like a long time, it can fly by when you’re trying to get your life back on track.
There are some very specific cases in which you may be able to have your case heard by a Texas court after the statute of limitations has passed. If you don’t discover the extent of a soft tissue injury until much later, you’ll have two years after the date of discovery to file a claim.
Get Compensation for Your Injury
Soft tissue injuries can be extremely painful and may take months or years to recover from. The best thing you can do when recovering from a soft tissue injury is practice PRICE. And always talk to a personal injury lawyer as soon as possible after your accident to start work on your case.
If you’ve suffered a soft tissue injury, our lawyers want to help you get the money you deserve. We’ll fight for your rights, collect evidence to prove your side of the story, and negotiate with the insurance companies to get you a fair settlement offer. Schedule a free consultation with our law firm Anderson Injury Lawyers today at (817) 294-1900 to discuss options in your case.