What Victims Know About Dog Attack Nerve Damage to Their Hands and Limbs
[Content Updated Feb 5, 2021] - Your hands are your primary tools for eating and self-defense. When a dog attacks you, you will try and protect yourself with your hands or kick the animal with your feet. Dogs will naturally try to bite and clamp down on your hand, foot, or other limbs with their teeth, instinctively immobilizing you. When an individual is the victim of a Los Angeles, California dog bite attack, their first concern is generally with the lacerations, including ankle or hand scarring.
Victims may experience more pressing issues besides superficially appearing wounds and less severe bodily injuries. Dog bites will cause some victims to suffer permanent nerve damage to their hands and limbs, causing loss of movement or sensation. The dog bite victim can lose their limb or finger in extreme dog attacks, making expensive emergency medical care and skillful surgical treatment necessary in many cases.
Contents:What Causes Nerve Damage?
What Causes Dog Bite Nerve Damage?
Canines have an unusual amount of jaw strength. Dogs remain domesticated wolves no matter what they look like to a person. Wolves, the dog's ancestors, hunted for food, ripping flesh from their prey, breaking bones. Modern dogs have not lost their jaw strength, with some large dogs equipped with as much as 200 pounds of jaw pressure per square inch. When a dog attack occurs, it can break hands and other bones, tearing flesh, damaging your nerves underneath your tender skin, tiny children, and females.
There are two ways your limbs and extremities can suffer nerve damage:
- Puncture bite: During a dog attack, a bite can break the skin.
- Non-puncture pressure bites: Doctors report that a dog's teeth don't need to puncture the skin to cause nerve damage; the jaw pressure is enough to crush your nerves.
You will not always know if surgery or therapy will help restore nerve function, so it's a scary thing to be diagnosed with nerve damage.
Treatment of Nerve Damage
Nerves carry messages to and from the brain to let the body know things such as temperature, pressure, and pain when coming in contact with something. The other thing these messages do is to tell the muscles how to react. If nerve damage occurs, it disrupts these signals, which can have several consequences, such as loss of sensation, numbness, or loss of movement.
Three types of nerve damage can occur:
- Neurapraxia: This is a type of minor nerve damage. So this means the nerves weren't severed. But they could be injured or crushed. So, in this case, the injury could heal in days or weeks.
- Axonotmesis: This is more severe nerve damage involving unsevered, intact, stretched nerves. Also, while this type of injury does have the ability to heal, it can result in the loss of sensation and movement. So if you're lucky, it can take can months or even years to heal from this kind of damage with therapy to recover range of motion.
- Neurotmesis: This is the worst type of nerve damage. Crushing, stretching, or laceration may result, including permanent damage unless surgically repaired or immobilizing the limb.
The dog bite victim's concern is nerve damage causes loss of sensation or movement in hands and fingers, affecting their ability to work, perform daily activities, damaging overall quality of life. If you are diagnosed with Neurotmesis, surgery won't completely restore your health yet will remain expensive, taking a long time to heal or partially recover.
Dog Bites, Nerve Damage, and Recovering Compensation
When a person suffers a dog bite, there are injuries such as lacerations, fractures, nerve damage, and even the risk of infection that need healing and a considerable convalescence period. You will also suffer from emotional trauma, not always easy to handle, including financial hardship for the victim's entire family.
If someone's extremities or limbs were damages by a dog bite attack, their legal right to maximum compensation exists. Our dog bite attorneys can provide excellent representation, assisting you in recovering all your deserving economic damages for medical expenses and lost wages, including your pain and suffering from losing or damaging a limb. The Ehline Law Firm Personal Injury Attorneys, APLC, provides dog bite victims with a free legal consultation to discuss their claims. Our superior dog attack limb injury lawyers never charge clients upfront fees, refusing to charge you for our services until we recover a fair and just settlement or award for your case. We are available 24 hours a day to assist you at (213) 596-9642, or you can fill out our online contact form to engage an accident attorney today.
