Your Charlotte car accident isn’t over… even though most of the damage has been done
This blog post is going to aim to change your perspective on what a Charlotte car accident really is.
Most people think of car accidents as discrete events in space and time.
For instance, your life is going along fine, then some airheaded pickup truck driver rear ends you at a stop sign and gives you whiplash and sends your life in a new and annoying direction. And indeed, that all might have happened. In this paradigm, the car accident itself may have only lasted a few seconds, at most.
But there’s another way to think about the event that might be more useful.
In this context, the North Carolina car accident actually extends in both temporal directions – before the actual event and after the collision itself. In this paradigm, all of the “lead up” to the crash can potentially be relevant. For instance, the truck driver’s habits of texting on the phone and his failure to get his brakes tuned ultimately set the stage for your stop sign crash. Likewise, your decision, perhaps, to forego wearing your seatbelt or to purchase a car with such and such safety rating could have also impacted events going forward. Weather events, road conditions, road engineering, and other indirect factors could have also played a role.
Then, consider what happens after the crash.
Perhaps you have a sore neck and back from the collision, so you need medical therapy of some kind. Well, the kind of therapy you get — and the quality of your recovery — can hugely influence the costs and pain of the crash. If you recover quickly from the whiplash, then maybe the accident does not play a huge role in your life. But if, for whatever reason, the neck and shoulder pain dogs you for weeks or months or years, the total amount of lost work time and therapy could be the equivalent of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars.
In other words, it’s useful, conceptually, to think of an “accident” as an ongoing process with roots in the past and tendrils into the future.
This framing invites the possibility that actions that you can take now can influence the effects of the accident on your health, future, wellbeing, and pocketbook. For instance, picking a solid Charlotte auto accident law firm, like DeMayo Law, might help you collect appropriate damages to cover your medical bills and other costs.
The moral is that you might still have power over what the accident will mean for your future, and you still control aspects of your care and your legal path.
So do good research and make proactive, smart decisions. It ain’t over yet! You can still course-correct.
