Some injuries are more severe than others, and for Arizona workers, they can mean not making a full recovery. When a workplace accident leaves your life significantly altered, you may wonder how you will manage.

Catastrophic injuries are the most serious. They prevent you from returning to your full physical capacity at work and home. The need for ongoing, lifetime treatment is often overwhelming. The professional team at Dix & Foreman, P.C. want to do all we can to prepare you for this devastating consequence of a work-related incident. Explore what a catastrophic injury entails.

Elements of a catastrophic injury 

When an injury leaves you with a permanent disability, it may qualify as catastrophic. These injuries involve the loss of a limb, severe damage to the brain or spinal cord. A construction worker falling from a roof may break his or her neck, resulting in paralysis. The worker can no longer work; thus, the catastrophic classification.

The three main categories of catastrophic injuries include:

Spinal cord – Like the example above, an incident that leads to a spinal cord injury often results in the loss of mobility of a portion of the body. These render a person unable to function as he or she did before the incident.

Physical – When a work accident destroys a part of the body beyond, such as crush and burn injuries, they typically result in a catastrophic finding.

Cognitive – Perhaps the most serious of all damage is to the brain and how it functions. When an impact to the head causes the brain to sustain permanent injury, it may lead to a loss of things like speech, memory or other mental processes.

Suffering a catastrophic injury will require financial resources beyond what you likely have. For more insight into this and other work-related incidents, please visit our website here.