Call The Police
If you’re in a car accident, the first thing that you should do is you should call the police. They’ll investigate the accident and ask you and other people questions. They’ll try to figure out what happened, and then they’ll make a charging decision. That charging decision will end up in traffic court, and that case will be resolved one way or the other, either with a guilty or not guilty.
You need to make sure that you report the accident to the police officers so the police officers can create a report and document what happened in that car accident. You may not know right away if you’re going to be in pain or if you’re going to need significant treatment going down in the future. But if you don’t document what happened, it makes it harder, later on, to prove what happened, and to prove objectively with someone who’s not interested in the outcome of the case.
Get Yourself Checked
The next thing you do is you need to go get checked out. You either need to go to an urgent care facility or the emergency room to be evaluated and see if you are injured. If you’re injured, tell them what you’re feeling. Document those things that you’re going through. A lot of times when you go right into the doctor, you’re thinking about what is the thing that hurts the most, but you may not be thinking about the thing that hurts the least, because your focus is on one part of your body and your focus is not on the other parts of your body. Make a list of everything that you’re currently feeling and even after the adrenaline starts to subside and then talk about all those things with your doctor.
A lot of times, what we find is that these things start to creep up and you start to talk about it a couple of days later, or a couple of weeks later. As you know insurance companies like to argue and will say something like, “Well, you didn’t mention that when you first went to the ER” or, “You didn’t mention that when you first went to the urgent care facility”. So, it’s important to stop and think before you just start communicating with your doctors, make sure that you tell the doctor everything that you’re feeling because it’s going to be important later down the road.
