One of the main characters in my story winds up getting very much on the wrong side of a magical being when he accidentally runs over her daughter who ran out into the middle of the street to try to flag down his car. After this, in a fit of rage, the woman kicks him in the side hard enough to break a rib, and then uses her superhuman strength to throw him upside-down and back-first into a car door hard enough to break the side window, before using her magic to curse him with blindness. The woman then abandons him in the middle of nowhere, but he winds up being rescued by a lycanthrope who heals his injuries (except the magically-cursed blindness) by infecting him with lycanthropy. I'm trying to get a sense of just how badly injured he would be after these things are done to him, if the injuries are fatal without medical attention, and if so, how long he'd stay alive (and, crucially, conscious). He's an 18-year-old boy in reasonably good shape (he plays football) and he has no notable medical issues. Would it be realistic for him to be still alive after those things were done to him? How long could he realistically expect to stay alive and conscious? And if what I've described is way too much (or perhaps for all I know too little), what would be a better way for the woman to injure him such that he'd still be alive and conscious, but probably wouldn't survive more than a few hours without medical attention?
Usually the cause of death from blunt force trauma like that is internal bleeding. Your character may have some broken bones, which will seriously limit mobility but bleeding organs will be the biggest issue. It’ll also drop their blood pressure, making staying or recovering consciousness very difficult. It depends on how badly the injuries were. A broken rib is not a terribly serious injury if close to medical care, nurses break ribs all the time doing cpr. Modern car doors are also fairly lightweight and I could imagine hitting one with my shoulder hard enough to bust it pretty bad with no damage to myself. They’re specifically designed to take as much damage as possible to reduces the forces involved in collisions with pedestrians or other cars.
Bleeding out from a puncture wound is probably the most plausible injury that would allow this. It's a common trope for a reason. Very flexible. Maybe a broken piece of the car stabs him in the side? Or a chunk of glass nicks an artery, and he's got to tie his shirt around his leg as a makeshift tourniquet or something like that? You can increase the rate of blood loss as the plot requires. Does the character need to be able to walk afterwards? Or are they just lying there until the lycanthrope finds them? There are more options available if he can lie there unconscious for several hours, but I think the options are a bit limited if he needs to be able to walk for a few hours.
Yep. It's also possible for a broken rib to puncture a lung and give him a pneumothorax, or (less likely) lacerate his liver. But honestly, I've seen people banged around quite a bit and come out relatively unscathed. Everyone is different. If you need him to be in serious trouble, have him hit his head on that backflip. He wouldn't survive a brain bleed without medical attention.
