If you have sustained eye injuries from a car accident, you probably have questions about who’s going to pay for your losses and how we’ll pursue your claim for damages. Also, you likely want to know about eye injuries from wrecks and how they can affect your life.
How You Can Get Eye Injuries from a Car Accident
You can suffer an eye injury in a collision in various ways, including:
- Direct impact to your face by the steering wheel, dashboard, back of the seat, door, window, or some other fixed part inside the vehicle you occupied.
- Direct impact to your face by an object that is airborne inside the vehicle during the crash.
- The impact of flying through the windshield or landing on the ground if the crash hurls your body out of the vehicle.
- A head or spinal injury
- Direct contact with something that collides with your car, such as another vehicle.
Types of Eye Injuries from Automobile Crashes
Some of the types of traumatic injuries to the eyes and area around the eyes can happen in a car accident include:
- Black eyes, which can heal entirely or leave you with permanent damage to the eyes and surrounding tissue
- Foreign bodies, like shards of glass or metal
- Corneal abrasions, from something scratching the surface of your eye
- Hyphema, when blood pools in the back of the eye from blunt force trauma
- Retinal detachment, from a blow to or near the eye
- Orbital blowout, when something strikes your eye socket
- Lacerations to or around the eye
Immediate medical attention is essential to prevent or minimize permanent loss of vision.
How an Eye Injury Can Impact Your Life
A significant loss of vision can take a toll on your ability to support yourself financially and live independently. The economic ramifications can be devastating. You can also develop depression and loss of enjoyment of life from being unable to engage in activities that brought you joy before the wreck. In addition, debilitating injuries can cause a breakdown in personal relationships.
Damages for Eye Injuries from Motor Vehicle Wrecks
You may be eligible for compensation for:
- All the reasonable medical care you needed because of the wreck and eye injury
- The income you lost while recuperating
- Future lost earnings if the injury leaves you unable to earn as much money as before
- Pain and suffering for your emotional anguish and physical pain
- Loss of enjoyment of life
- Your spouse’s loss of consortium
What We Have to Prove to Win Your Damages Claim
We cannot sue anyone for your damages if you were in a one-car accident and you were 100 percent at fault. However, if you sustained eye or facial injuries because of someone else’s negligence, we’ll investigate the wreck to see whose actions might have been at least partially to blame.
To hold someone responsible for your losses, we must prove all four of these aspects of negligence:
1. The at-fault party owed you a legal duty.
In car accidents, it is a simple matter to establish legal duty. All drivers have a duty to operate their vehicles with caution.
2. The driver breached her legal duty.
If the driver’s actions do not measure up to the standard of the cautious operation of a motor vehicle, she is negligent.
3. The negligence caused the accident.
Negligence alone does not make a person liable. We are all negligent on a daily basis, but we do not notice it because no one gets hurt. For a driver to be responsible for a collision, her mistake must be what caused the wreck.
4. There must be measurable harm.
You must suffer physical harm to get compensation for the car accident. If you experienced a terrible fright, but there was property damage only and no physical injuries, you do not have a personal injury claim. But if you sustained physical injuries, such as an eye injury, because of someone else’s negligence, you can get compensation.
Recovering Compensation If You Were Partially At Fault
Washington State law allows you to recover some of your damages if you were partly to blame for the crash. Our state uses the rule of comparative negligence, which assigns a percentage of fault to each person, then reduces his financial recovery by that amount.
Let’s say that you had damages of $500,000 for your eye injury and you were 10 percent at fault. The rule of comparative negligence will reduce your recovery by 10 percent ($50,000), which brings your compensation to $450,000.
Getting Legal Help Recovering Compensation for Eye Injuries from a Car Accident
If you sustained an eye injury in a crash, do not trouble yourself with trying to decipher the records, determine who was negligent, and calculate the amount of damages you should receive. The car accident team at Max Meyers Law will do all of those things for you, and the initial consultation is free. Call us today at 425-399-7000 to set up your no-cost, no-obligation meeting.