Oooh ooh I have things to add!
- Re: the shoulder injury above - if someone sewed up the skin but didn't reattach nerves, tendons, etc. that were (fully) severed those things still will not work! Look up the anatomy of the area you're injuring and what the things there do
- Even if things aren't fully severed the pain and swelling in an area can make healthy muscles unable to contract as a protective mechanism (ask anyone you know who's had an ACL tear about their quads post injury/surgery). That's why an injured leg "gives out". If the situation is important enough (like your character is running for their life) their brain miiight override that but not necessarily
- Most nerves carry both sensation and motor signals so if you damage a nerve you will likely have numbness/tingling/maybe pain (in specific distributions that you can look up) and also weakness or paralysis of specific muscles depending on the severity of the injury
- Nerves take for freaking ever to heal (axons regenerate at ~1mm per day or ~1 inch per month) and sometimes they just don't (especially if they're fully severed and not surgically reattached)
- For most common injuries you can look up healing timelines but be careful with what endpoint you're looking at - for example you might be back to ADLs (activities of daily living like walking, dressing, maybe cooking and cleaning) in as little as a week but that doesn't mean you're back to running or sports or fighting bad guys
- Also with timelines there's a limit to how much you can push them. Like yes a pro athlete (or spy or superhero or whatever) might be pushed to go back "too soon" but if you're cutting 3 months off of a 4 month recovery timeline either they're 100% going to get reinjured because the tissue isn't healed yet or they're straight up like not even walking yet
- Pain, especially chronic pain, is super complex and interesting, and so often misunderstood or misrepresented (in medicine, not just in writing). If your source for how chronic pain works is more than ~5 years old it's probably wrong. There almost always BOTH physiological/biological factors and psychosocial factors in chronic pain and reducing it to just one or the other is both probably wrong and also likely not as interesting to your story - for a while we kind of thought it was all biological and then the pendulum swung to it being all psychological but it probably is both for most people
- A note / expansion on the above point about adrenaline: the phenomenon described is totally accurate but it's not just because of adrenaline. Pain is at its core an alarm system that your brain/nervous system uses to protect you. So if the most dangerous thing for you right now is the bear chasing you, it might not produce a pain experience to alert you about your broken leg, but once the bear is gone the broken leg is now the most important thing and your brain will make sure you're in enough pain that it's your top priority
- Bigger picture, your brain also isn't always correct in its danger assessment and it can both over- and under-react to the situation, which has the potential to be really narratively interesting (although it's kind of problematic for real people unfortunately). For example someone with chronic pain might find the sensation of a scarf or necklace painful because their nervous system overreacts. Conversely, if someone is always getting in fights and coming off totally fine their nervous system might underreact to a more major injury sustained in that familiar setting and they might not feel the pain of a broken bone until 2-3 days later when the inflammatory process gets bad enough that the brain realizes it judged wrong (seriously. ik that sounds fake but it literally happened to my professor who fell off a horse and was not in pain from a literal broken spine until 2 days later)
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