There are plenty of ways that an injury can happen. When an injury happens, the first thing that needs to happen is that you need to get assessed by a medical professional. While a hospital bill can be scary, going to a hospital is the most ideal place for immediate injury care if it is severe enough.

The youngest daughter who is writing this has had a couple of injuries now, with two very different levels of severity. I am mostly going to talk about my most severe injury of the two. When I first figured out how bad the injury was, I was around the corner from urgent care. Urgent care is a nice place to go for an injury, because you get to be one of the highest priorities, which is a nice incentive. The downside to urgent care for injuries is that they don’t always know how to distract you from the writhing pain.

If you suspect you have a severe injury, a hospital is a better place for immediate injury care.

One reason is that a hospital can give you medicine for the pain more immediately. Using a hospital for immediate injury care can sometimes pose a challenge in some cases, such as was my case when I broke my arm. I had no transportation, and neither did the person who witnessed the accident and was helping me. I had been lucky to have been around the corner from the nearest urgent care.

While a great incentive for using an urgent care with an injury where you are in visibly enough pain is that you get bumped up to top priority, the downside can be that getting assessed can be challenging. My injury was so severe that I was howling in pain when the nurses would try to move my arm enough for that first x-ray. I had been lucky enough that a nurse was willing to drive me to the nearest orthopedic specialist, where I had an easier time with that x-ray.

Recovery isn’t a one and done deal with any injury that I’m aware of.

Two years after everything happened, I had been approached by some people who were around when I was recovering from my broken arm, and they asked me how my arm was doing. I had just casually said that it tends to hurt in the winter, and they said something to the effect of “Yea, that arms never going to be the same again”. And I didn’t realize how much sense that made until later.

Every winter, my arm would get kind of achey, and it would be difficult to do hard labor tasks. I later had casually brought it up to my chiropractor, and discovered that there were things he could do for the pain. So the last thing I would say on this is,

Don’t be afraid to ask your chiropractor about injury care, even if it’s an old injury.