How Long Is This Supposed To Take?

How Long Will It Take for My Accident Injury to Get Better?

If you have been involved in a car accident, you probably have suffered from some form of injury.  By simple deduction, the more severe the injury, the longer it will take to heal.  But this doesn’t necessarily set people’s minds at ease when we tell them that it is going to be an indeterminate length of time for your injury to no longer be there.

Injuries can quickly take you out of the game of life, forcing you to sit on the sidelines watching others that you used to associate with continue on making it even more emotionally damaging to the recovery process.  I am asked regularly from these patients how long it will take.  When they get the best answer I can give them, “I’m not sure”, it is frustrating.  So I want to address the concept of soft tissue repair for you.

What Is Soft Tissue Repair?

It is easy to make a duration guess for injuries to the bones, because they take a set amount of time to heal, 6-8 weeks.  You can almost set a clock by it.  But when you are talking about injuries to the soft tissue, the variables surmount.  Because the human body is dynamic and is constantly moving, we constantly stress the injury, thereby increasing the time it takes to heal.  If you strain a muscle and you keep using it, it remains strained.  You tear a tendon or ligament, and you continue to use it, the results are the same.

Another way to look at it would be, if there is a crack in the sidewalk and the repair team comes and puts a new layer of concrete on the ground and you ride your bike across it, they have to go and fix the new problem.  Because we are being cantankerous in this example, after they repair the tire tracks you do it again.  In fact, you keep doing it just because you want to keep riding your bike on that path.  Until you give it the proper time for the new concrete to heal, it will continue to be a problem.  To make things worse, the ligaments and tendons are limited with blood supply and therefore heal much slower.

Determine the Extent of Your Injury ASAP

When it comes to healing, the one thing that I always try to remind and reinforce to our accident patients is that patience is the name of the game here.  Don’t get discouraged that you aren’t healing as fast as you thought that you would.  It is all in the process of recovery.  Another possibility that you may be dealing with is the potential of having a permanent injury due to a significant tear in the tissue.  Unfortunately, if you are dealing with this caliber of injury, the prognosis isn’t good.  It may be a problem that you will deal with for the rest of your life.  I hope that these are not your injuries, but there is the real potential that they could be, and you should find out that status of your injury ASAP.  An MRI is a sure way of determining the extent of the injury.

If you are suffering from a car crash, waiting is the last thing that your body needs for recovery.  Call The Whiplash Center of Utah immediately to schedule your initial appointment. 435-674-7515