The First 72 Hours After a Car Accident in Zanesville
Published
The crash is over in a second. The next three days are where people make the decisions they end up living with.
Not the legal decisions. The ordinary ones. Whether to get checked. Whether to say something about the neck. Whether to just see how it feels tomorrow.
Here is what those three days actually look like.
What should I do at the scene?
Assuming nobody needs an ambulance and you are able to move around:
Get out of traffic. I-70, Maple Ave, State Route 60. Doesn't matter. If the car moves and it is safe, get it to the shoulder.
Call it in. A police report creates a record of what happened while everyone still remembers it. Three weeks from now, memory is a worse witness than paper. For crash report information in Ohio, the Ohio Department of Public Safety is the right starting point.
Take pictures. Both cars, all angles, the position they ended in, the road, plates, insurance cards. More than you think you need. Your phone does not run out of room.
Trade information. Names, numbers, insurance, plates. If somebody stopped and saw it, ask for a number. Witnesses evaporate fast.
Do not narrate. Not because anybody is out to get you. Because "I'm fine" said at the scene is a thing you cannot unsay, and you have no idea yet whether it is true. Adrenaline is in the driver's seat and it lies. Say what happened. Skip the assessment.
What about the first night?
Here is where the honest part starts.
You are going to feel okay. Rattled maybe, a little shaky, but physically okay. That is not luck and it is not you being tough. Your body dumped a load of adrenaline the moment the impact happened, and adrenaline is very good at hiding pain. That is what it is for.
It buys you a few hours. Then it clears.
So the "I feel fine so it must have been minor" conclusion you reach on night one is being made by a body that is actively lying to you. Everybody does it. It is the single most common mistake after a crash.
If you have any of the emergency warning signs, worsening headache, confusion, vomiting, numbness, weakness, trouble breathing, chest or abdominal pain, do not sleep on it. Genesis is right there. Go.
Otherwise: sleep, and pay attention tomorrow.
Day two is the day people get it wrong
You wake up stiff.
Neck does not want to turn. Lower back is tight. Shoulder aches where the belt caught you. Maybe a headache starting behind your eyes.
And here is what almost everybody does with that information: nothing. They decide it is soreness. They decide it will loosen up. They take something for it and go to work.
That stiffness is not soreness. It is the injury finally showing up on its own schedule, now that the adrenaline is gone. Read up on delayed symptoms after a car accident and you will find the same pattern every time. Day two and day three are when it lands.
The window where treatment does the most good for strained soft tissue is right here. Not in a month. Right now, while the tissue is still deciding what it is going to become.
Day three is when the headache shows up
If it is coming, this is usually when.
Base of the skull, creeping forward. Behind the eyes. A band of pressure. It is one of the most common things we see after a crash, and it usually is not really a head problem at all. It is a neck problem referring upward. Our full write-up on the headache that starts on day three walks through why.
This is also the day people start second-guessing themselves. It has been three days, they told everybody they were fine, and now walking it back feels like admitting something.
Nobody is keeping score. The stiffness on day three is not a contradiction of the "I'm fine" on day one. It is just what happens. Crash-test research from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety on neck injury risk has been showing the same thing for years, even the seats designed to protect the neck cannot prevent every one of these.
What should I actually do inside 72 hours?
Short list.
Get evaluated. Even if you feel okay. Especially if you feel okay, because that is exactly when people skip it. An hour now beats three months of wondering.
Do not wait on your claim. Care and paperwork run on separate tracks. Waiting for one to sort out before starting the other just means hurting longer.
Find out what coverage you have. MedPay on your own policy can go toward treatment regardless of fault, and a lot of drivers around here carry it without knowing. One call to your agent.
Keep moving, gently. Not the couch for a week. Motion is what keeps things from locking down.
Write down what hurts and when. Not for anybody else. For you. On day twelve you will not remember whether the shoulder started on Tuesday.
Why does any of this matter?
Because the difference between the people who are back to normal in six weeks and the people still dealing with it at Christmas is usually not the crash. Very often it is the same crash.
It is what happened in the seventy two hours after.
At Muskingum County Accident & Injury Center on Maple Ave, you can get evaluated without a referral and without waiting weeks for an opening. If you were in a crash in Zanesville or anywhere in Muskingum County and it has been under three days, that is the right time to walk in the door.