Kibbey Wagner | June 25, 2025 | Car Accidents
Car accident victims often experience intense harm, both physically and emotionally. The severity of the incident will typically dictate the wounds you sustain. Still, even relatively minor collisions could leave you with significant medical expenses and potentially cause long-term consequences.
If you’ve been in a Palm Beach Gardens car accident, it’s important to determine whether the injury you sustained meets Florida’s serious injury threshold. If your injuries qualify, it may allow you to step outside of the state’s no-fault laws.
Below is more information about the various types of car accident injuries you can suffer and what they can mean for your claim:
Whiplash
The most common of all car accident injuries is whiplash, which is a kind of soft-tissue wound that occurs when your head moves rapidly back and forth, straining muscles in the neck. It’s particularly likely to occur during rear-end crashes.
What makes whiplash stand out, though, is that you may not realize that you have suffered the injury for hours after the accident. Only when inflammation begins, which can take a few days, will you experience neck pain and stiffness.
Thankfully, whiplash typically resolves on its own. However, you may need some form of treatment if you can’t turn your head or if you experience nausea or headaches; such symptoms could point to a more serious injury.
Bone Fractures
The impact of the collision could leave you with all manner of broken bones. Bracing your legs or arms during the crash could easily result in such injuries, but you can also experience rib breaks if you hit the steering wheel or if your airbag deploys with excessive force.
Stress fractures represent the mildest form of fractures, though they can still take time to heal and result in pain that might keep you from living your life normally. Comminuted fractures, on the other hand, are among the most severe, seeing as the bone shatters into two or more pieces. These can take months to heal fully and sometimes require surgery to repair, impacting your work and personal life.
Burns
It’s possible to come into contact with the hot metal parts of your vehicle or another vehicle during a collision, along with steam and other harmful substances. Burns can leave you with scars that could be potentially disfiguring, requiring reconstructive surgery and other intensive treatments.
One of the most serious risks of burns, though, is the chance of an infection. Because layers of skin are damaged, you have less protection from bacteria, which can put you at risk of developing gangrene and even suffering from sepsis.
Internal Injuries
If the force of the crash causes you to slam against any part of the vehicle, it’s possible to sustain internal injuries that may not be immediately apparent. These include damage to your organs that could put your life at risk.
A challenging aspect of these wounds is that, like whiplash, they can take time to make themselves known. Even if you suffer damage to a part of an organ, the rest of it will try to take up the slack for as long as possible. Only when the organ can no longer keep up with its function will you begin to notice symptoms.
Nevertheless, these are catastrophic injuries that tend to require significant medical care and could leave you facing long-term health issues.
Facial Injuries
It’s also quite common for glass to break and all manner of debris to travel through your car in an accident, potentially causing you to end up with facial cuts and fractures to your nose or cheekbones. These, like burns, are disfiguring injuries that could lower your quality of life and typically require extensive reconstructive surgeries.
Back and Spine Injuries
It’s very common to suffer injuries to your back and spine during a car crash. From soft tissue injuries (like herniated discs) to fractured vertebrae, it’s possible to end up with lasting back pain and mobility issues.
The most severe of these injuries are those that impact your spinal cord. If the nerves or vertebrae are affected, you risk losing sensation and control of the muscles below the injury site. Partial or complete paralysis is a possibility, depending on the severity.
In turn, you would be unable to live your life as you used to and might not be able to support yourself or your loved ones. These injuries are usually severe enough to allow you to pursue a claim against the liable party despite Florida’s no-fault laws.
Traumatic Brain Injuries
Traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) occur when you hit your head hard enough for your brain to shift within your skull, or when an object penetrates the head. Both scenarios can leave you battling chemical changes that impact cognition, moods, and activity levels.
Concussions are the mildest kind of TBI, yet they can still result in significant confusion, memory issues, nausea, and headaches. And though they tend to heal relatively quickly, they could mean having a propensity for suffering future TBIs.
More severe types of TBIs, such as diffuse axonal injuries, can leave victims in comas or even result in their death. These typically result from rollover and speeding accidents at high speeds or truck collisions.
Psychological Injuries
Being in a car accident, more often than not, results in more than just physical wounds. You can experience intense emotional trauma that results in anxiety, depression, and even post-traumatic stress disorder. Some people develop phobias regarding driving and cars that could make living their everyday lives very difficult.
Contact Kibbey Wagner Injury & Car Accident Lawyers For Help Today
After being in a car accident in Florida, you can usually receive compensation via your personal injury protection (PIP) insurance. If your losses are severe to the point that your PIP can’t cover all of them, you may be able to file a claim against the liable party.
For more information, please contact the Stuart, Port St. Lucie, or Palm Beach Gardens personal injury law firm of Kibbey Wagner Injury & Car Accident Lawyers to schedule a free consultation today.
We proudly serve Martin County, St. Lucie County, Palm Beach County, and its surrounding areas in Florida:
Kibbey Wagner Injury & Car Accident Lawyers Stuart
73 SW Flagler Ave
Stuart, FL 34994
(772) 444-7000
Kibbey Wagner Injury & Car Accident Lawyers Port St. Lucie
1100 SW St. Lucie West Blvd. Ste 202
Port St Lucie, FL 34986
(772) 247-3374
Kibbey Wagner Injury & Car Accident Lawyers Palm Beach Gardens
300 Ave of the Champions Ste 170
Palm Beach Gardens, FL 33418
(561) 944-4000
--------------------------------------------------