When getting into a car crash, injuries often follow. Some of the worst potential injuries include crush injuries.
What exactly are crush injuries? How do they impact victims?
The cause of crush injuries
As Up To Date states, crush injuries happen in many places with steep impacts. A crush injury can occur in any situation where a person ends up compacted, pinned, compressed, flattened or otherwise squished between or beneath a larger or heavier object.
For example, if someone ends up trapped under rubble in a collapsing building due to an earthquake, this counts as a crush injury. Another form of crush injury could involve a person’s foot ending up run over by a truck or other vehicle.
Crush injuries in car accidents typically happen in one of two ways. In the first, a person ends up ejected out of the vehicle at some point and gets crushed between a vehicle and the road, their car and another, or a car and some other object.
In the second, the car the victim is in ends up impacted in some way, and the buckling of the metal creates a crush situation within their own vehicle.
Deadly repercussions
All crush injuries are serious, though some are certainly more immediately deadly or dangerous than others. In any crush injury situation, a person should get immediate treatment by medical professionals to cut down on the chance of complications, adverse effects or death.
Potential complications could include infection, sepsis, gangrene, necrosis, limb loss, organ failure and even death, showing just how important it is to take crush injuries seriously.