You got hit. Now what.

You got hit. Maybe on Lindbergh at the light, maybe on 55 coming home, maybe in the lot outside work with your hands full. You traded information, took pictures of the bumper, and drove home because you had a shift in the morning. Now you are reading this at the kitchen table doing math. This page is the sequence: what a crashed back does over the first week, and what to do about it without blowing up your schedule.

Hour one: you feel fine, and that is chemistry

Right after a crash your body dumps adrenaline and stress hormones. Pain gets muted. Your hands shake a little, you feel wired, and you can bend and twist and load the truck like nothing happened. People clock in the next morning all the time on that feeling and decide they dodged it.

Do not sign off on your own back the same day it got hit. It has not finished telling you what happened. The strained muscle and ligament in your neck and low back are only starting to swell, and swelling is what you will feel tomorrow.

What to do in hour one is simple. If anything scares you, go to the emergency room. If nothing scares you, write down the time and the direction of the hit, and go home. That note will matter more than you think.

The first night: stiff, not alarmed

The first night is usually a bad night of sleep and a stiff neck in the morning. Turning to check a blind spot feels tight. The low back feels like you slept on a bad mattress. Most people call this sore and move on.

That is fine as long as you treat it as information. Sore after a crash means soft tissue got loaded past what it was built for. The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke notes that whiplash symptoms can be delayed, sometimes by a day or more, which is exactly why the first night tells you less than the second morning does. (NINDS, whiplash information page.)

Days two and three: the bill comes due

This is when the low back locks up, when getting out of the truck takes a strategy, when you find out a ten-hour shift on concrete is its own kind of hard. Headaches that start at the base of the skull. A neck that will only turn halfway. A dull ache across the belt line that sharpens when you lift. Strained muscle and ligament swell late. This is normal, and it is also the window where an exam is most useful, because there is something to examine.

Call the clinic in this window if you have not already. Missouri Injury Clinic takes auto-injury patients at three rooms around the metro, and the South County room on Tesson Ferry is open until 6 Monday through Thursday. Say it was a car crash and when. They will get you examined and put a plan on paper. Read how to get seen this week for the script and what to bring.

One hard line inside this window. If numbness or tingling is running down a leg and getting worse, if your legs feel weak, if you lose control of your bladder or bowels, that is an emergency room problem tonight. Those are the warning signs the NINDS lists for back pain that needs urgent care, and a clinic is the wrong door for them. (NINDS, back pain page.)

Days four through seven: the tough-it-out trap

By the end of the first week, most people have settled into one of two stories. Either they got examined and have a plan, or they are managing it with ibuprofen, a heating pad, and a decision to see how it goes. The second story is the expensive one. Not because a clinic is cheap and the alternative is not, but because a back that goes unexamined keeps getting worked, and a worked injury heals on its own schedule, which is slower than yours.

The tough-it-out trap has a specific shape for shift people. You cannot take the time, so you do not get examined, so you do not have a plan, so you keep doing the lifting that aggravates it, so the pain settles in, so now you really cannot take the time. The exit from that loop is one appointment. It costs you a couple of hours this week and gives you something you can work from.

What the exam gets you

A history of the crash: the direction of the hit, whether you were belted, what hurt first. A physical exam of the neck and back, range of motion, where the pain lives, what makes it worse. A diagnosis if the findings support one, and a straight answer if the right move is imaging, a referral, or a different specialty. And a written treatment plan you can repeat out loud.

That written plan does two jobs. It tells you what to do and what to avoid on shift, which is the part you actually need. And it is dated, which means every visit after it gets measured against a baseline instead of a memory. That second job is covered on the get it in writing page, and it matters more than people expect.

The week after: work with a plan

A written plan beats guessing. It tells you what is injured, what treatment looks like, and what you can safely do at work while it heals. If your job needs to know what is going on with you, a documented exam is a lot more useful than telling your supervisor it hurts. The back on the floor page covers that conversation.

That is the whole playbook. Examined early, plan in hand, follow through. Nobody on this bulletin is going to tell you what to do about insurance, and the clinic will not either. The narrower point is that a back that got hit deserves to be looked at by someone who can, and this week is the week to do it.