Newark Motorcycle Accident Lawyer

Road rash is a skin injury that happens when your body scrapes across asphalt or other road surfaces at high speeds. The rough texture abrades your skin, and the friction between the road and your body also generates heat. As a result, the scraped skin also suffers a burn.

Road rash can produce disfiguring scars on your skin. It can also produce traumatic tattooing. This injury occurs when debris gets forced under your skin, leaving you permanently disfigured.

Uneven road surfaces and debris on the road, such as broken glass, can slice your skin. Deep lacerations have the potential to sever arteries, causing fatal bleeding. Non-fatal lacerations expose you to infection by microorganisms on the road, leading to sepsis and death in some cases.

Lacerations can also cause scarring. Scars develop because replacement skin cells are not as elastic. Those skin cells produce discolored, non-pliable scars along the laceration.

Motorcycles have many hot surfaces on or near their engines. When you crash, contact with these surfaces can damage or destroy the skin.

Motorcycle accidents can also produce chemical burns. A crash can rupture lines carrying caustic chemicals, such as brake fluid, and injure your skin, eyes, and mucus membranes on contact.

First and second-degree burns will usually heal without complications. But third-degree burns destroy the entire thickness of the top two layers of skin. This produces painful wounds that expose you to infection, dehydration, and scarring.

The impacts your body endures during a motorcycle crash can fracture bones. Your motorcycle could also fall onto your leg, ankle, and foot, crushing them and shattering the bones.

A simple fracture can take six to eight weeks to heal. A shattered bone requires reconstructive surgery and may take over a year to heal. In both cases, broken bones can cause complications, such as nerve damage, and increase your risk of arthritis.

Brain injuries can occur when your head hits the ground. Although helmets reduce the severity of head and brain trauma, your brain can still shake inside your skull from the impact.

Your brain controls everything in your body, and an injury to this vital organ can cause physical symptoms such as headache, weakness, and clumsiness. Cognitive symptoms of a brain injury include confusion, amnesia, and emotional outbursts.

These symptoms will usually go away if the brain injury is mild, such as with a concussion. A severe brain injury, like a cerebral contusion or subdural hematoma, can lead to permanent brain damage, coma, and death.

You may strike your face when you get ejected from your motorcycle during a collision. Crashes also produce debris, such as broken glass and metal shards, that fly into your face. These impacts can cause eye injuries, broken facial bones, and dental fractures. Injuries from facial trauma can disfigure you and cause vision loss.

When you ride in a car, the seat and headrest somewhat protect your neck from hyperextension during a collision. Motorcycles do not provide this protection. As a result, you can suffer neck injuries as your head whips around during a crash, bending and twisting your neck. Several injuries can result from this movement, including:

• Neck strain
• Sprained neck ligaments
• Herniated or bulging discs
• Fractured neck vertebrae

A broken neck vertebra is one of the most serious injuries you could suffer in a motorcycle crash. If bone fragments dislocate into the spinal canal, they can compress or sever the spinal cord, leaving you permanently paralyzed.