Unpredictable, expensive, and often permanent to some degree, burn injuries can be debilitating in ways which are not always readily apparent.
To ensure adequate compensation to cover the physical and psychological damage, it’s highly recommended that you seek legal advice after a significant burn—even if the damage doesn’t seem to present an immediate burden.
Looking purely at the physical component of the injury, burns can impact any tissue of the body. Depending on the severity of your burns, skin, muscle, bone, and nerves can all be damaged in the initial incident. Ongoing infection, poor healing of damaged tissues, and other complications can further exacerbate your medical concerns.
Mild burns often resolve with minimal care. Immediate treatment with cool water to prevent further damage, followed by care to keep the wound clean and prevent infection, will handle first and second degree burns in most cases.
Third or fourth degree burns are far more dangerous, and must be treated professionally to minimize the risk of complications in recovery. Burns this severe may not hurt, due to nerve damage—and simple cooling of the wound or home treatment with topical medicines can be dangerous, even as first aid.
Severe burns can require a lengthy recovery process involving skin grafts, prosthetics, rehabilitation, and more. Cosmetic surgeries to alleviate scarring and other aesthetic damage may also be necessary for a full recovery.
Not all burns heal perfectly, and even when they do it can be a lengthy process. While you recover, you may miss out on significant earning potential due to lost hours of work, the loss of opportunities to advance, limitation on your future work capabilities, etc.
Similarly, loss in general quality of life during or after recovery can be devastating, and entitle you to appropriate compensation.
Burns often take an equal toll on emotional well-being and your psychological health. Even if you find yourself in good physical health with no financial burden, a burn injury can have a lingering effect on your life.
Your suffering due to the emotional distress and pain of the initial injury, ongoing pain and emotional distress during recovery, disfigurement or loss of self-esteem stemming from the injury, etc., can be as relevant to your case for a burn injury as your physical injury.
The key to evaluating a case of burn injury lies in where and how the burn occurred. Factors such as where the injury occurred, the extent of negligence or error which lead to the injury, and related factors will determine two important questions: Who is liable, and how liable are they?
In especially egregious cases of negligence or malicious intent, where simple coverage of liable damages is not adequate, punitive damages may be even be awarded.
Effective assessment of a burn injury case can be difficult without professional assistance; liability is not always intuitive to a lay-person, and the full extent of damages can be difficult to determine unassisted.
Pursuing more information on your potential burn injury case is always advisable for this reason—and in the meantime, be sure to document every aspect of your injury thoroughly.
