The spinal cord is essential to almost all human activity. This cord connects the brain to the rest of your body, including your legs and feet. Nerve signals travel up and down the spinal cord, allowing people to move their limbs and experience sensation. If you feel someone tickle the sole of a foot, that’s because a signal travels from your foot up to the brain.
Unfortunately, serious accidents can injure the spinal cord, despite the protection offered by surrounding vertebrae. Call The Stano Law Firm to discuss whether you can obtain compensation for an accident which results in a serious spinal cord injury. In this post, we look at the full cost of these injuries.
How People Sustain Spinal Cord Injuries
The cord runs up the middle of your back. You can suffer damage in any type of traumatic accident:
- Car collisions
- Truck accidents
- Pedestrian crashes
- Falls from a great height
- Violent attacks
- Medical errors
Although vertebrae surround the cord, these bones can crack or shatter under sufficient force. Tiny fragments can slice into or cut the spinal cord. Any nerve damage can impair the ability of signals to travel up and down the cord, which means most people experience some impaired sensation or movement.
In extreme cases, the cord is completely cut into two pieces. That means you will completely lose movement or sensation below the site of impact.
Medical Expenses for a Houston Spinal Cord Injury
A spinal cord injury requires some of the most expensive medical care in the state. The Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation collected information about the cost of medical treatment for spinal injuries. They then averaged this information before publishing it.
The numbers are startling. Quadriplegics are looking at $1,064,716 in average medical care for the first year alone. Each subsequent year they will average $184,891. Someone who suffers this injury in their 30s could be looking at millions of dollars of necessary care moving forward.
Less serious spinal injuries require less in medical care, but the numbers are still staggering. A paraplegic will average around $518,904 in the first year for care and $68,739 for each subsequent year.
Even incomplete spinal injuries resulting in motor function impairment will cost roughly $350,000 in the first year and a little over $42,00 for each subsequent year.
These statistics are almost 10 years old. Given the exploding cost of medical care this decade, the typical accident victim will spend much more than this over the course of their lifetime.
In addition to surgery to stabilize the spine, other accident victims need ongoing physical therapy or rehab. They can also pay for at-home assistance with bathing, cleaning, cooking, and getting dressed.
Income Loss
We can’t forget to include lost income and job opportunities because of a serious spinal cord injury. When someone is paralyzed from the neck down, they probably can’t work ever again. Other accident victims who lose feeling or movement in their legs probably also need to transition to a different job. Imagine a beat cop who is paralyzed from the waist down. He might need to take a desk job or transfer out of the police force entirely. The same is true of anyone who experienced numbness or other impaired sensation.
A new job might pay less, and someone who cannot work will lose out on possibly decades of income. At The Stano Law Firm, we include lost income or wages in a demand for compensation. This is an important type of economic loss, which victims should be compensated for.
Don’t Forget Pain and Suffering
Personal injury law empowers victims to seek compensation for economic losses. But you also can request financial compensation for intangible losses like pain and suffering, depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Spinal cord injuries turn lives upside down. Many people can no longer enjoy playing with their grandchildren or participating in their favorite hobbies. Many couples can no longer enjoy sexual or romantic intimacy. Depending on the injury, some accident victims are housebound. It is easy to struggle with depression and other disorders after such traumatic accidents.
The Stano Law Firm requests meaningful compensation for pain and suffering. Of course, most people would like to have their old body back, but that’s impossible. At best, we can ask the defendant to pay you money.
Challenges Receiving Settlements
A big challenge is trying to obtain as much compensation as our clients deserve. Very few people have millions of dollars sitting around in the bank to pay a settlement, even if they are responsible for the accident which injured you. For example, Texas only requires that motorists have insurance with a minimum coverage of $25,000 for bodily injuries. That wouldn’t begin to cover the costs of medical care, to say nothing of lost income and pain and suffering.
There’s good news. Sometimes, the defendant is a business, who should have a larger insurance policy. For example, you might have been hurt by someone driving for their job, in which case you can sue their employer. This is also an option when a person is hurt in a tractor-trailer accident.
Other clients can sue a business for a property defect which harmed them. Houston businesses should also have liability coverage to pay out a settlement.
Let our legal team review the facts. We will search for ways to join additional defendants to your case. For example, we might also sue a car manufacturer for a defect. This technique often makes a bigger pool of money available for our clients.
Schedule Your Free Consultation with a Houston Personal Injury Attorney
Spinal cord injuries are life changing. Perhaps only severe traumatic brain injuries are as disruptive. You deserve compensation when someone negligently or recklessly injures you in an accident and you end up with paralysis or other long-term disabilities. Please call The Stano Law Firm to schedule a meeting with our Houston personal injury lawyer. We have helped countless people like you access the justice system and obtain fair settlements for their injuries and we proudly serve our clients in Houston, Cypress, Katy and Humble. Call us today to learn more.