Although any type of bodily injury can make it hard to perform daily activities, a heart injury can significantly affect your productivity, besides last the rest of your life or even be fatal. Many people who suffer from heart injuries have to go through extensive surgeries. What’s more, their recovery can stretch out for weeks, months or even years. Sometimes, people have heart conditions that are the result of the carelessness of others. Here’s what you need to know about heart injuries and how a Wisconsin heart injury lawyer helps victims recover financial losses.
Common Causes of Heart Injuries
A heart injury is any injury that involves the heart. While sometimes heart injuries are caused by trauma, in other instances, they’re due to using medications. Heart injuries can also be caused from a heart attack or by different diseases, including cardiomyopathies. Because your heart is one of your body’s most critical organs, any kind of injury can pose considerable danger.
Blunt Injuries to the Heart and Myocardial Contusion
A blunt cardiac injury or BCI is one involving a blow to the chest that results in rupturing the heart’s walls, bruising the heart muscle or damaging a heart valve. These heart injuries can be the result of a direct blow.
Car crashes are a common cause of myocardial contusion, which is a bruise to the heart muscle. Falling from a height of more than 20 feet can lead to a bruised heart muscle. Myocardial contusion can also be caused from a person receiving chest compressions during CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation).
Heart Injuries from Taking Medications
In some cases, medications, such as certain types of chemotherapy drugs, can cause a condition known as cardiomypathy or cardiotoxicity. There are specific kinds of over-the-counter and drugs and dietary supplements that lead to heart failure, which is a condition involving the heart being unable to pump an adequate supply of blood for meeting the body’s needs.
For example, taking too many NSAIDS (non-steroidal and anti-inflammatory drugs), such as ibuprofen, can increase the odds of heart failure. This is because these drugs cause the body to retain salt and fluid, which can make it more difficult for diuretics to eliminate fluids. As a result, more stress is placed on the heart, which can result in heart failure.
Sometimes, people develop heart injuries from taking medications with product labels that don’t contain proper instructions, regarding dosage and side effects. In other situations, a product hasn’t been manufactured correctly and is defective or has been designed poorly.
Heart Injury Symptoms
Often, people who have heart injuries lack symptoms. Those that do have symptoms usually experience chest pain and bruising as well as suffer from injuries around the ribs or breastbone. Some people go into shock and have cool, sweaty skin that looks bluish, along with dangerously low blood pressure and poor blood circulation. In other situations, people have high blood pressure (hypertension). Heart palpitations or abnormal heart beating that’s either too fast or too slow can be another symptom
Considerations and Warnings
- Myocardial contusion cases can range from mild to severe. But all cases should be properly evaluated by a doctor or another type of medical professional because even mild cases can lead to complications.
- A tear in the wall of the heart, as well as heart valve damage, typically requires surgery.
- You probably don’t have a case if your physician or pharmacist has warned you of the severe side effects of a medication before they have prescribed the drug, but you still take it anyway.
How Heart Injury Lawyers Help Victims
Being injured is challenging enough, but it’s particularly difficult when the injury isn’t your fault. If you have a heart injury caused by the irresponsibility of someone else, you need to be sure you receive the proper financial help that’s entitled to you. That’s why it’s important to hire a highly trained and experienced Wisconsin heart injury lawyer to examine and handle your case. Your personal injury lawyer can help you get reimbursed for the cost needed for surgeries, medications, medical equipment, rehabilitation expenses, physical and emotional trauma and other costs.
Have you been injured from someone else’s negligence? Maybe you have a family member who’s been injured. Call the legal specialists at Harnitz Law Office and set up an appointment for a free consultation. Our personal injury lawyers are dedicated to giving our Wisconsin clients the best legal representation possible. Please contact us and learn more about our wide range of legal services. Besides personal injury, we also specialize in real estate law, collection and consumer law, civil litigation, business transactions and other matters.
