If you get in a car wreck, then you can injure yourself in all kinds of ways. Scratches, bruises, and cuts are common. You might sustain a traumatic brain injury if you hit your head, or you may break a bone or multiple bones.
Dental issues are injuries that you might not think about that can be car accident-related. You can easily smack your face on the steering wheel or dashboard if you endure a sudden impact. In this article, we’ll talk about what you can do if a car accident causes a dental injury.
How to Tell if You’ve Sustained a Dental Injury in a Car Accident
If a car crash causes a dental injury, you might not realize it immediately. That’s because you might have sustained other, more serious harm that demand your attention. Also, your adrenaline might be pumping, so you may not be sure whether you’re okay or not until you’ve calmed down and taken a few moments to look yourself over.
By the time an ambulance shows up, you should be able to determine whether you’re more or less okay or whether you’ve sustained severe harm. Swelling, bleeding, or bruising usually indicate oral damage.
What to Do if You Determine that You’ve Sustained an Oral Injury
Oral injuries can be exceedingly painful. If the crash knocks some teeth out, for instance, exposing the roots to the air, that will be tough to deal with, and you’ll want to see a dentist. Obviously, if you have other life-threatening injuries, you must deal with those first, but as soon as you’re capable of it, call your dentist and tell them what happened.
If it’s an emergency, your dentist should find time to fit you in that day or the next day at the latest. If they can’t, such as if they are on vacation or something along those lines, you might look for another dentist in the area. You don’t know them, so you don’t know how good they are, but you could be in such pain that you need attention without any further delay.
What Dental Injuries Can You Suffer in a Car Accident?
There are all kinds of dental issues you might encounter following a violent car wreck. You might lose some teeth, or the accident might have loosened or chipped some of them. You might have a crown fracture, an impaction, or cracked enamel.
You might even have to deal with an ongoing problem in the days and weeks that follow the accident, such as TMJ issues. The dentist can deal with some of these injuries quickly and with minimal pain, such as a chipped tooth. Dental science has reached the point where a competent dentist can fix something small and superficial in very little time.
If you sustained serious damage, such as if the crash knocked out several teeth, then unfortunately, you’re in for a longer stretch in the dentist’s chair. The recovery time afterward will be no picnic either, as you’ll probably have to eat soft foods like pudding, mashed potatoes, soup, and so forth.
What Will Your Dentist Want to Know?
If you’ve been in a car wreck, and you’re not certain about whether to see your dentist, you can call and describe what you’re seeing and feeling. They might ask you whether you have any pain when you open or close your mouth. They may ask about your chin or lips feeling numb.
They also might ask about temporomandibular joint noises, like clicking when you open and close your jaws. They may want to know whether you have limited jaw movement, difficulty speaking or chewing, or altered occlusion.
You might only start to experience some of this in the days after the accident. You may not fully understand the damage until a bit of time has elapsed.
What Can You Do About the Damage from a Legal Standpoint?
If you figure out that the car accident hurt your mouth or teeth, you should not delay in seeking help, as the pain might get worse. Dental repairs can get costly very quickly, though, so you’ll want to figure out how you can pay for whatever you need the dentist to do.
Who pays for it will depend largely on who caused the accident. If the other driver caused the wreck, then there is no reason why their insurance should not cover your dental bills.
If the other driver does not believe that they caused what happened, then you may have to hire a lawyer and bring a suit against them. You may need to pressure them and force them to pay your dental bills, not to mention any other related medical costs. You might have broken bones or additional injuries to go along with some missing teeth.
It may take some time for your lawsuit to work its way through the court system. The discovery process and the subsequent trial, if the other driver’s lawyer does not encourage them to settle with you, can take weeks or even months.
You can’t wait that long to resolve your dental issues, so you must get the dentist to do whatever work you need and hope that your dental insurance can cover it for the moment. If you win your lawsuit, the other driver should reimburse you for that money, so keep careful track of all your bills.
You might be able to work out a payment plan with your dentist if the emergency repair work costs thousands of dollars and you can’t pay it all at once. Most dentists will take pity on you and let you pay your bill in installments if they know that you are destitute.
Oral pain is some of the worst that you can suffer, and car wrecks that cause it can be particularly unpleasant. If you find the right dentist, though, they should be able to fix you up so that you’re as good as new eventually.
