You have just been hit on your bicycle. You are hurt. What should you do?
Get Medical Care:
First, get appropriate medical care. Call 911 for medical help if needed, or if you think you may need it. Cutting back on medical care when you are hurt is not a good gamble to take, especially when you head severely hits the ground, bones are broken or you just know you have serious injuries.
Appropriate medical care under the circumstances may mean an ambulance ride, emergency room visit and following care to include physical therapy, chiropractic care or pain management.
Get an Attorney:
Second, expect an insurance adjuster to be calling you shortly, offering you a settlement or asking for an adjuster interview. You should consult an attorney before giving an insurance interview or accepting any settlement. Unless you regularly work with personal injury cases you will often not have the breadth of experience needed to determine whether that is a good settlement offer or not. Some cases are obvious, like death or dismemberment, where the insurance company just offers its liability limits, but many other cases are not so obvious and may include several insurance polices that have to be consecutively exhausted in order to reach the next. Only experienced personal injury attorneys know how these insurance policies interact and how to maximize your settlement.
Document your Injuries:
Third, document, document, document. This means saving pictures of your bike damage. As the damage to your bike can indicate how the collision occurred, whose fault it was, and how violent the collision was. Do not throw the bicycle away. If you do fix it, document the damage first, then let the bike shop mechanics know what happened so they can see if there are any internal parts that were also broken. Some parts take more force to break and this can show the violence of the collision. A more violent collision generally means the potential for more severe injuries.
Additionally, you need to take photographs of your physical injuries. Bruising, scrapes, deep cuts, and broken bones will heal (sometimes not 100%) and the evidence of your injuries need to be documented at every stage. You can time stamp the pictures by a written log that you keep, or your camera time stamp.
How your clothing was torn can also indicates injury, collision violence and how the collision occurred. You should save these items when possible, or at least take pictures of them.
Watch for Head Injuries:
Any personal injury attorney that really practices injury law will be watching closely for medical signs of a head injury. When you are in a collision, chances increase that you hit your head. When you are hit on your bicycle, your chances increase even more. With, or without a Helmut, head injuries can occur and they are very serious.
Head injury symptoms may be the following.
A period of confusion, disorientation or impaired consciousness. Observed memory dysfunction. Symptoms may be dizziness, headaches, fatigue, irritability, or impaired concentration following an injury.
If you are experiencing head injury symptoms, you should immediately visit your family doctor for a referral for brain injury testing and any treatment follow through. Head injuries can be in many different forms. Do not wait. Hire an attorney experienced with head injuries.
Conclusion:
Call personal injury attorney Jacob S. Gunter at (801) 373-6345 for a free consultation at your home or at his office. Jacob@provolawyers.com