Laceration Injuries: No, it’s not “just a cut.”

There is the general sense that when someone suffers a laceration, that they aren’t that injured. A laceration is seen as a cut, or some kind of superficial wound, the kind that many of us had as children when we played too hard.

But overlooking the severity of lacerations is a big mistake. When people get injured because of a laceration, the consequences can be long lasting, serious and painful.

How Does Skin Get Lacerated in an Accident?

While skin can be lacerated by coming into contact with a sharp object, or a pointed object, that isn’t the only way that lacerations happen. They often happen when the skin is stretched so far, that it just gives out, and tears.

This can happen if a part of your body were to get caught under a tire, or jammed in a car’s door—the pulling motion and the force can and often does, end up tearing the skin.

Lacerations can also happen with friction when the skin contacts a surface—the most obvious example is road rash, where someone falls on the road, and skids for a distance—the friction of the road can tear at the skin.

Most disturbing is a degloving injury, where the skin rips completely off. This usually happens with limbs or fingers or toes. Much like a glove coming off of a hand or foot, the skin is torn away, and completely pulled off of the limb or appendage.

Initial Dangers and Risks

One initial danger with lacerations is the bleeding. Major loss of blood, and thus, the body going into shock, are common with major laceration injuries.

Deeper lacerations will need to be stitched, and some may even need to be kept open for a while, while the wound heals from the inside out. This can require routine (and often painful) packing of the wound with gauze.

Long Term Complications

While lacerations can heal they often don’t heal into normal skin—they heal into scar tissue. That scar tissue is not skin, and is not meant to be as pliable and flexible as your skin is. This means that lacerations victims can have serious loss of range of motion.

They also can suffer from loss of sensation, because lacerations don’t just destroy skin, they also destroy the underlying nerves. And while scarring may visually heal up the laceration, scar tissue has no nerve endings—the loss of feeling and sensation in these areas can be permanent. Sometimes, additional surgeries may even be needed, to restore as much feeling and mobility in these laceration affected parts of the body as possible.

Underlying Complications

As serious as laceration injuries can be, they can be much worse for those with underlying conditions.

Diseases like diabetes, blood disorders, hemophilia, or other kinds of disease, can turn what would normally be a quickly healing laceration into a very serious and life threatening medical condition. Loss of limbs can happen, as can death in very serious cases.

Schedule a consultation with our Tampa personal injury lawyers at Barbas, Nunez, Sanders, Butler & Hovsepian today if you or anybody you love, has suffered a laceration injury after an accident.

Sources:

hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/lacerations

medlineplus.gov/ency/imagepages/19616.htm