I'll have to go pick him up
OK, Jeanne, before you pick him up, you need to find out a couple of things.
First, when your husband filled out his employment papers, did he mark the option on his worker's comp forms that allows him to see his OWN physician, rather than going to their clinic? If he did, call your doctor immediately and make arrangements for your husband to come in on an emergency basis when he arrives.
If he didn't, you need to harrass the guy at Swift (or have your attorney do it) for the name and location of the "approved" worker's comp facility in your area to make the same appointment for the minute you get your hands on him. And if they tell you there isn't one--get the name, number and title of the person who tells you that if they do--then you find the closest large medical center ER to where you pick him up at. Call that ER and tell them you'll be bringing him, approximately when and why. They might even put their own ortho people on notice if they know you're bringing him. If you end up doing this, tell them you're scared of blood clots. I don't think they'll put you off if you do.
Because before you take him home, you're taking your husband to a doctor. It doesn't matter how tired he is--in fact the tireder and more worn out he is, the better--because you have GOT to have medical documentation of exactly how much damage has been done due to the delay, how much unnecesaary pain and suffering has been caused by the delay and inappropriate treatment, and you have GOT to be sure, before you so much as walk in your front door, that there aren't any serious complications like DVT in the offing. I'm sure all of us will be praying that it's a waste of time, but you're better safe than sorry.
See, the thing is that once you take him anywhere but straight to a doctor, Swift can try to claim that any aggravation of his condition is because of something he did on his OWN TIME, and not as a result of his injury and their response to it. Again, in college I saw time after time that companies tried to get out of expensive worker's comp claims by saying that "personal activities" were responsible for the aggravation of the condition, and that they weren't responsible. And a lot of time they won at least a "mitigating factor" decision that put a large percentage of the bills back in the lap of the injured worker.
And their story about needing to see a specialist because it's a rare condition sounds to me like they're looking to claim it's a pre-existing medical condition that their insurance is exempt from that caused him to fracture his leg.
You've got to have absolute documentation at this point of
everything that happens from the minute he gets into your care. And your doctor needs to know that there's probably going to be some question about your husband's health status when he left to go to training.
What your DH has is what they thought I had last winter--what they call a greenstick fracture. (Mine ended up only being a bruised bone, fortunately, but the docs thought to begin with that I had the fracture, so I have some idea of how they SHOULD have been handling this based on what was done for me.) These fractures are NOT uncommon and anyone who tells you that is a straight up liar. They CAN BE complicated and can take a lot longer to heal than you would expect. Partly because when your bone "breaks" it's into separately identifiable pieces that they can go in and stablize it in some fashion--plates/screws, glues, immobilizing with a cast, that kind of thing. When you have "fractures", often what happens is more like the webbed cracking you see in pottery glazes. There's no way to stablize that kind of webbed thing, only to externally brace it until it heals.
It's going to hurt for a while. I suggest finding out about something for his pain other than Vicodin, though--that crap is seriously addictive if you're on it for more than about a week to 10 days. And the main thing he's going to need, if nobody told him to ice his leg--WTF!
!--is some anti-inflammatories that are more hard core than just OTC ibuprofen.
He'll need the ibuprofen...pr
obably for years to come. My bruised bone still aches when I overdo it--I went to Disneyland all day last Saturday, and I'm still feeling it.
You've got to be incredibly proactive about this going forward. And be prepared that he might lose his job over this. They've bungled it so badly that Swift--whose bad reputation is deserved--may just decide that if they get rid of him, they'll get rid of the claim, and they'll trump up a reason to fire him. I've seen the letters in files where companies did that.
Don't tell Johann that. He's got enough to worry about trying to get well. But that attorney is going to be critical if this is going to work out in a positive way. Lawyer jokes aside, sometimes they're the LGD protecting your herd from the company wolves.
