Anywhere there’s a joint between two bones in your body, you will also find fibrous ligaments. Unfortunately, this soft tissue is susceptible to spraining or even tearing in an accident. If you are suffering from a torn ligament, working with a Virginia car crash attorney is crucial to ensuring all your financial costs and physical pain are included in any potential compensation.
How Ligament Injuries Occur in Car Crashes
Ligaments are a flexible tissue that maintains your bone structure, helps different body parts move, and prevent hard surfaces of bones from grinding against each other. While torn 
ligaments often occur in sports mishaps or slips and falls, those aren’t the only ways to sustain this injury.
Although ligaments are capable of stretching when you move, a sudden and violent motion can lead to spraining and even direct tearing. That’s a particular risk in accidents like car crashes when parts of your body may be whipped back and forth at high speed. Rear-end or head-on collisions, for instance, may lead to whiplash and painful damage to ligaments in the neck and spine.
Ligament damage can also occur in T-bone wrecks, rollovers, and other crash types, especially if a body part was turned at an awkward angle just before or during the accident. A serious car accident may lead to sprained or torn ligaments in body parts such as:
- Ankles
- Back
- Elbows
- Feet
- Hips
- Knees
- Meniscus
- Rotator cuff
- Shoulders
- Spine
- Wrist
Victims of torn ligaments will likely deal with ongoing pain, soreness, swelling, and reduced range of motion with that body part. Depending on the location and severity of the injury, a torn ligament may drastically impact your ability to work or even stand on your feet for long periods. That may cause major interference with your finances, which is a serious problem if you are also dealing with outrageously high medical bills during recovery.
What to Do After a Sprained or Torn Ligament in a Car Wreck
Unlike a broken arm or serious laceration, ligament spraining and tearing isn’t immediately obvious. Symptoms don’t always appear on the day of the accident, and with the pain of other injuries, you may not be aware of the issue. Unfortunately, soft tissue injuries often get worse with time, especially if they aren’t caught and treated quickly. It is possible to end up with extreme, long-term pain and even permanent physical disability after a torn ligament.
Seeing a Richmond area doctor as soon as possible after any wreck is crucial to protecting your legal rights. Unfortunately, a torn ligament won’t appear on an x-ray or MRI directly after the crash. It may take time for a diagnosis, which is why it is important to follow your doctor’s orders and quickly report any pain or soreness so there’s a paper trail on your symptoms. When the tear is finally found, treatment may involve surgery, anti-inflammatory prescriptions, and long-term physical therapy.
That’s why the critical next step after addressing your medical condition is to get in touch with an experienced Virginia car accident lawyer. You need a qualified legal professional to investigate the car crash and prove your ligament injury occurred in the collision. After that process, a lawyer can negotiate with insurance to get the full and fair financial compensation you actually deserve.
In some cases, the best source of compensation will instead come from a personal injury lawsuit against the negligent party. In torn ligament car accident cases, potential damages could cover:
- Hospital bills after the car crash and other medical expenses from your torn ligament injury
- Income lost if you couldn’t immediately return to work
- Future earning capacity if the torn ligament results in permanent disability and you can’t return to the same job
- Non-economic compensation covering pain, suffering, and reduced quality of life
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