November 2024 UPDATE
I ended up settling in January 2023 after having a new adjuster assigned to my case. She started denying menial things (like house keeping) despite me being catastrophic. It felt like she was looking for an excuse to send me for a whole new batch of IE’s. I decided to settle for less than I felt was fair because we were approaching 10 years and I didn’t want to go through everything all over again, especially with the stories about LAT delays. I figured having that stress out of my life would at the very least allow me to breathe and hopefully improve a tiny bit more.
The reduced stress was nice, but short lived. I had a CT scan on my neck shortly after as the sharp pain radiating down my right arm (I reported this to medical professionals a few years prior) was getting worse. This led to be being referred to an MRI, which slipped through the cracks. I ended up calling the hospital a year later because I figured I lost the appointment letter. The hospital found the requisition and said they forgot to schedule one, and booked me into a cancellation a few days later. This MRI revealed I had severe cervical spine stenosis. This made the majority of my symptoms post accident make sense.
This revelation opened up a new wound. Why did health professionals simply label me as a chronic pain and unspecified nerve damage case without at the very least imaging my entire spine? Was there a bias because I was in an auto accident, or simply a shortfall of our health system? Would my recovery outlook have been different if this was caught early?
I will never know now as I don’t have a time machine. All I know is the insurance company treating me as an automatic fraudster instead of doing what they were supposed to do, make me whole again, did not help.
I now have this hurdle to go through with our strained health system, but at the very least I don’t have to deal with the additional trauma that auto insurance would put me through.
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I feel the need to share my story after what has happened this past week in London.
A few years ago I was driving home one night (road conditions were wet) when a girl from oncoming traffic made a sudden left turn directly in front of me which resulted in a collision (she was deemed 100% at fault). I suffered various injuries (including a brain injury and a lot of nerve damage). Dealing with the car insurance company was a pain in and of itself. I was initially put in the major injury category (with no income replacement even though I had multiple failed return to work attempts) and ran out of treatment funding in two years. After about a year of no treatment funding, burning through all my savings and going into debt, getting many ‘biased’ IME’s, and my lawyer battling with the insurance company, I got really lucky and got an honest IME report from a well known ‘Insurer biased doctor’ which put me in the Catastrophic Injury Category.
The bad stuff didn’t end here. By this point I was really suicidal between my injuries not improving and how I was being treated by the insurance company, which the Insurer’s doctor made this abundantly clear in his report. That didn’t stop their lawyer from threatening me in our mediation. He threatened me by saying “you’re a selfish greedy liar and if you don’t settle for pennies on the dollar today I will use the millions upon millions of insurance company dollars to cut you off your treatments again” . I felt powerless and hopeless at that point and later that evening I left a note for my family and had an attempted suicide which landed me in the hospital.
The next major event which ties into the recent terror events in London was at my next mediation with the torte. When we were getting close to a court date after a few years and having their own doctors agree that my injuries were catastrophic, do you know what the insurance company lawyer’s last argument was?
“We are in London, Ont. We are going to get a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant if you don’t know what it means) jury and we are going to show them this video (filmed by their surveillance of me walking on a treadmill at the gym per my treatment providers treatment plan for my rehab), and they are going to see you are a fraud” alluding to the all ‘immigrants’ are scammers stereotype.
I was dumbfounded at this point since I had never experienced racism first hand being born and raised in this country. I was advised by my lawyer not to go to court because it was very clear they were going to make my race apparent and the odds were we would get a racially biased jury in this city.
I still struggle to this day because our Insurance system and justice system aren’t designed to be fair to vulnerable people. It’s akin to walking into a store, being shadowed by security the entire time you’re there, and then being held indefinitely when you try to leave because you might’ve stolen something and they aren’t going to let you go until they can prove it.
Thanks for reading and I hope things improve for future claimants because this current system is inhumane.