A broken hand may impact everything you do. Your work, daily living activities, hobbies, and family life may all be affected if one of the bones in your hand or wrist break during a car accident.
Types of Broken Hand Injuries
You may break one or more bones when your hand forcefully hits the steering wheel or dashboard or is bent at an unnatural angle. Those bones include the:
- Wrist bones: scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform, trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, and hamate bones
- Palm or Hand bones: Metacarpal bones
- Finger and thumb bones: Phalange bones
Altogether you have 16 wrist bones and 38 hand bones that may be broken, fractured, cracked, or crushed.
Living With a Broken Hand
After a car crash, you should report any of the following symptoms to your doctor:
- Any hand pain, but especially hand pain that gets worse when your grip, squeeze, or move your hand
- Swelling
- Bruising
- Stiffness or lack of mobility
- Numbness
- A deformity, such as a finger bent in the wrong direction
If your doctor suspects that you broke one or more hand bones, then you may have an x-ray done to confirm the diagnosis.
Broken hand treatment may require:
- Immobilization. While your hand is immobilized, you may be unable to type, drive, cook, take care of yourself, or work.
- Medication. Your doctor may prescribe antibiotics to prevent infection and prescribe or suggest over the counter pain killers to help you manage your pain.
- Physical therapy. You may still experience stiffness or difficulty moving your hand even after your cast comes off and your medical treatment ends. Physical therapy may help you reduce stiffness and regain movement, but it can often take a long time to achieve results. For many months, you may continue to have difficulty working and performing everyday activities.
- Surgery. You may need surgery to treat a broken hand injury if you suffer an open fracture, a break that extends or threatens to extend into a joint, ligament, nerve, or blood vessel injuries, or broken bone pieces that move before healing. Your doctor may recommend pins, plates, rods, or screws, or a bone graft.
Sometimes, a full recovery isn’t possible, and you may live with the pain or limited use of your hand for the rest of your life.
Broken Hand Damages
As with any car accident injury, your broken hand recovery depends on the unique injury that you suffer. When someone else’s negligence causes you to suffer a broken hand or wrist, you may recover for your past and future:
- Medical costs including hospitalizations, surgeries, medications, doctors’ appointments, physical therapy appointments, and other healthcare needs.
- Lost income for any wages, bonuses, raises, benefits, and income from self-employment that you couldn’t earn due to your injury. You may recover for partially lost income if you worked fewer hours or for less pay or for all of your lost income if you couldn’t work at all.
- Pain and suffering for the physical pain and emotional suffering you experienced due to your car accident injuries.
- Other damages that you incurred because of your broken wrist, hand, or finger.
We prepare every case as if it is going to trial, and we aggressively negotiate with insurance companies to provide you with a fair settlement. If the insurance company is unwilling to provide you with fair compensation for your injuries, then we won’t hesitate to go to court to get you the recovery that you deserve.
Have You Been Injured In A Wisconsin, Illinois or Iowa Car Accident?
If you've been injured in a car accident you should speak to an experienced car accident attorney as soon as possible. You can contact us online or call our office directly at 800.800.5678 to schedule your free consultation with one of our car accident lawyers. We have been helping car accident victims since 1964 and service clients throughout Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa.
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