Realisitic Injuries

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Everyone is unique and will react differently. Some people yell and scream when they are hurt, others will keep quiet. Some will insist that they're perfectly fine and be annoyed by attempts to help. Some people are very squeamish and find the idea of how badly they're hurt more traumatic than the actual injury. Find out how the character you're writing an injury for reacts and stick to it unless you have very good reason not to.

Fainting

Can be caused by pain, fear, surprise, or other emotional stress and is usually not a major problem as long as they wake up within a few seconds. Immediately after fainting a person's pulse would be very slow but recover quickly.

Shock

Can follow many injuries and can be as dangerous or more so than the actual injury. It is not just a case of someone suffering from a nasty fright because they got hurt.

Symptoms include:

Pulse and respiration abnormally fast or slow,
Pale, clammy skin,
Shakiness,
Dilated pupils,
Confusion.

Someone suffering from shock should be lain down and kept warm.

Minor Injuries

Bumps, bruises, cuts and grazes are all inconvenient but not incapacitating.

A blow to a bony part of a limb or to a joint hurts a lot at the time of impact (as anyone who's banged their shin will agree) and may swell and stiffen. The impact may also have the effect of temporarily disrupting the 'power supply' to the limb meaning the person getting hit is likely to lose their grip on anything they're carrying and be unable to move the joint for a few minutes.

Bruises can take anything from a few seconds to over a day to appear and anything from a day to several weeks to fade away again. Soft fleshy areas bruise much more colourfully.

Sprains and torn muscles / tendons and so on will stiffen, swell and become more painful after a few hours. A bad sprain can be every bit as incapacitating as a broken bone. 

Head Injuries

Probably the most common injury in fiction. From "let's bash the bad guy over the head to stop him running after us" to those scenes where everyone gets thrown all over the flight deck by the first bit of turbulence and bounce their heads off consoles.

Minor Head injuries

The human skull is pretty robust and designed to take a fair amount of punishment. Consequently the occasional bump won't do all that much damage.

A minor bump on the head may leave a character feeling dazed and suffering from a headache, blurred vision and ringing ears but will clear within a few minutes.

Facial bruising is actually quite uncommon, it takes quite a hard blow or a blow that impacts with the soft tissue around the eyes to leave a mark.

Minor cuts and lacerations on the scalp and face will hurt and bleed out of all proportion to their seriousness.

Medium Head Injuries

A more forceful blow (equivalent to a fall of several feet) can lead to complications of the injury.

Concussion (damage to the brain tissue) is quite common after a hard blow to the head and is often accompanied by temporary unconsciousness. (And it should be very temporary if you don't want your character to be permanently damaged). This can also result in dizziness, nausea and, not surprisingly, a nasty headache.

Medium cuts and lacerations will be painful and messy but not dangerous. There may be scarring.

Severe Head Injuries

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