5 Ways Serious Injuries Might Change Your Lifestyle

If you live a good, long life, then hopefully, you’ll get through it without any serious injuries. Some people can accomplish this.

They live carefully, avoiding risky behaviors, and they also have some luck on their side.

However, the reality is, the longer you live, the higher your injury chances. If you get hurt, you’d hope that it will be minor, and you can recover quickly. Unfortunately, not everyone is so lucky.

A serious injury can alter your entire life. Here are ways your lifestyle can change if something calamitous happens to you.

You Might Have to Miss Work

There are many ways you can hurt yourself. You might:

• Sustain a car accident injury
• Slip and fall
• Hurt yourself while playing sports

Sometimes it is your actions that hurt you. Other times, it happens because of someone else’s reckless or negligent behavior.

In either case, severe injuries will take time to heal. While you’re healing, you might not be able to work at your job. That depends on what exactly the injury is and the kind of work you do.

This is a time when more people work from home. If you do the sort of work where that is possible, you might continue working from your residence if your boss is okay with that.

If you do something where you must physically be there to get paid, the injury could sideline you until you’re back on your feet again.

You May Not Have as Much Money

Not having as much money is something that might happen if you’re hurt and can’t work. Maybe you have a job in:

• The retail industry
• The restaurant industry
• The security industry

These are just a few career fields where you have to be there in person to do the work. You can’t cook in a restaurant’s kitchen if you’re lying on your couch at home recuperating. You can’t work as a lobby security guard if you’re stuck at home healing.

If you can’t work, you can’t make money, unless you can get worker’s comp benefits. Whether you can do that will depend on how you hurt yourself.

If you got hurt while on the job, you can probably get worker’s comp because your employer’s insurance should cover that. You have to meet the criteria, but unless you did something egregiously wrong, you can probably get some or all of your income until you can return to work.

If you hurt yourself away from work, you might not be able to collect any money. If you injured yourself because of reckless behavior like if you consumed alcohol, got behind the wheel, and caused a car crash, expect no money from your work while you recover.

You Might Have to Pay Money if You Lose a Lawsuit

Let’s say that a scenario happened to like the one we just mentioned: you imbibed alcohol, drove, and caused a car accident. You hurt yourself, but also other people. If that happens, then the other vehicle’s driver or passengers might bring a civil lawsuit against you.

If this occurs, and the jury finds you guilty, that could turn out a lot worse than you simply not making any money while you recuperate. Now you’re in a situation where you might have to drain your savings to pay the settlement against you.

You may have to liquidate your assets to pay that settlement. You might have to sell your house, vehicle, etc. if you seriously injured someone.

Now, you’re in real trouble. You’re hurt, so you have to heal up before you can work again. At the same time, you have this settlement hanging over you that you must pay.

You might have to declare bankruptcy. This shows you how quickly your entire life can change if you make a single poor decision.

You Might Not Be Able to Do Some of the Things You Once Could

It’s also true that you might sustain an injury from which you will never entirely recover. Maybe you’re in an accident, and you lose a limb. Perhaps you injure your spinal cord, so you can no longer walk.

If these sorts of things happen, you’ll have to learn an entirely new way to live. You might have to retrofit your house or apartment in various ways so you can get around in it more easily. You may have to go through extensive physical therapy to relearn how to do certain things.

You might not be able to do something as simple as walking around the neighborhood anymore. These are extreme circumstances, but a severe injury can do that.

You May Deal with Depression

If you badly injure yourself, you may never fully recover from it. If that happens, you might have to deal with mental and emotional issues as well as physical ones.

You might have to go into therapy to deal with how you feel. You might think back to what your life was like before, and you may wish it was like that again. You might even excoriate yourself for how you acted, leading up to the tragic event.

You’ll have to find a way to learn to live with yourself. A good therapist can help you do that. They might also recommend that you go on antidepressants. Those can be the answer for some people who must deal with horrendous injuries.

You probably wouldn’t wish a serious injury to anyone. You might be going through your life in a happy-go-lucky fashion, thinking everything is in your favor, and then the next thing you know, you’re out of action, dealing with a lengthy recovery period.

Perhaps someday you’ll get back to where you were before, or maybe you won’t. Either way, it will take tremendous mental strength to get past this event and enjoy the rest of your life.

Hopefully, in time, you’ll get there. Even if you’re never quite the same as you were before the injury, you can find a new lifestyle and take joy in it.