A facebook friend commented on the date, and this suddenly reminded me that on this date ten years ago I was injured on the job. 07/07/07 is a terribly memorable date, after all, and it is an injury that still flares up to haunt me from time to time.

I was working in the warehouse department of a theme park, and was sent to deliver some supplies to one of the food and beverage booths. This park has a road of sorts outside the guest part of the park for such purposes, and I was driving a small electric warehouse cart not unlike a golf cart.

It looked something like this. credit

I was stopped at a T intersection, waiting for cross traffic to go past. The traffic in this case was a telehandler crane fitted with a forklift. The driver was a ways off, but the cart is not nimble or quick, so I decided to wait until it drove by.

One of these, or a similar model. Not a little warehouse forklift. credit

The telehandler as approaching from my left, and as you can see in the image, that boom obscures the driver's view to his right somewhat. To make matters worse, he was running with the forks a bit high in disregard for the rules for forklift handling I had just read in the manual when I was hired a few days previously, and was driving at a good clip. I therefore was entirely justified in my assumption he was going straight, and had no reason to believe he would make a sudden, fast right-hand turn and hit me.

That's what he did, though.

I didn't have time to bail or try to drive away. The cart was not nimble or quick, remember? All I had time to do was make sure I wasn't in danger of being skewered directly, and then hang on tight. It was a close call. One fork tine hit the seat just a few inches below my butt, and the other scraped across the front of the truck just ahead of my knees.

So, how familiar are you with physics? When a big heavy thing hits a smaller light thing, what happens? And when a squishy human body suffers a sudden acceleration, bad things happen.

Obviously no bones were broken, and no blood was shed. I recovered enough from the accident thanks to the adrenaline rush to think I was OK and drive off to complete my delivery. But the adrenaline was fading before I returned, and i was feeling quite sore and shaky. I was rushed to the first aid station for an examination immediately upon my return.

Here is where things really went wrong.

I was still not feeling too bad thanks to the body's natural response to injury and danger, and my more acute pain along with the adrenaline masked the duller, more severe pain. This was used as an excuse by Workers' Compensation to screw me over as I began to realize the extent of the soft tissue injury. And of course, it's hard to medically specify such injury in the first place. Broken bones are quantifiable. Back pain often isn't, especially when you're told to only go to the Workers' Comp doctor who doesn't really care about the patient. You're just someone to be processed through.

Making matters worse, the doc kept insisting I try to work despite the pain, and told me to take an overdose of Aleve to cover the pain. This meant that I never missed enough days of work in a row due to the injury to trigger some potential coverage, and I developed some internal bleeding thanks to NSAID-induced ulcers/bleeding.

I tried to work extra-hard to be the guy who shrugs off the pain and gets back to work, and I still suffer from it occasionally as a consequence. I did eventually get some physical therapy for the muscle spasms and a more effective pain reliever, but I still needed to lawyer up when the Worker's Compensation suddenly decided not to pay anymore for therapy I had already received. In the end, stuff was paid for, but I was still in pain, and not in an especially good position financially

Lessons learned:

Never trust a forklift driver.
Workers' comp sucks, and choice would have afforded me better care at a lower cost. Side note: anyone calling for socialized medicine is a complete idiot.
Keep detailed records of how you feel after an injury, and list everything no matter how inconsequential it seems at the time.
Don't try to "man up" when you know perfectly well that you are injured too much to return to work. You'll make it worse.
It may be a bad idea to fight fire with fire, but it can help to fight lawyers with lawyers. The system is still rigged from the start though.
NSAIDs are not exactly "safe."

It's been ten years today since the injury...

Lessons learned:

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