The sting, frustration, and yes embarrassment, of the first lawsuit was barely a blip in life’s rearview mirror when the second one reared its ugly head. This one started out with a bit more promise because it was a workers’ compensation claim, but once again Jane overplayed her hand and it went absolutely nowhere! Yes all the while she promised an end to our financial struggles.
At this point in our life, Jane needed to be working to cover the costs of our life and have anything left over for a family night out at the end of the week. Unfortunately, she wasn’t then or now very good at working. Her employer at the time this lawsuit took seed was a national gas station/convenience store chain. I think it was her first job after her longest running employer fired her. I could tell this job wasn’t going to last much longer. She bitched about it and her boss more and more every day and managed to steal a significant amount of money from them without getting caught (I will expound on this in a later post), it was time for her to leave.
I got a call from Jane one afternoon while she was at work. I knew as soon as I heard her voice that something was amiss. I could barely understand her because of the pain and tears in her voice. What was clear was that she needed me to pick her up and take her to the ER. I don’t remember why I was available to do this; for the most part Jane worked at this job during the same ours I worked. Maybe it was a weekend; her new supervisor wasn’t too concerned with what arrangements Jane had when she was hired.
At this point in my marriage to Jane, experience taught me about Jane’s ability to get hurt, real or otherwise. I knew from the minute I heard her voice this was all a ruse. Jane either wanted to get access to pain medication, or use sympathy to avoid blame for something she wasn’t sure she got away with…yet.
When I arrived at the gas station, Jane was in the little office with her supervisor. Her supervisor was filling out the accident report and trying to get Jane to sign it. Jane was pouring on the “I am in so much pain I am unable to function” act. Three times her supervisor had to ask her to sign the report while Jane pretended to be in too much pain. Finally, she scribbled some undecipherable crap on the report and we headed to the hospital.
The story was that she was on a ladder, a rickety old ladder that no one had any business being on, getting something from the upper shelves. The latter teetered and she fell off hitting her right side on something on her way to the floor. She had her shirt pulled up and was rubbing the part of her back and side she claimed to have hit. There was some minor redness but nothing that looked like it was the result of falling off a ladder.
They checked her out at the ER, did x-rays, told her to take a couple of days off and see her regular doctor at the earliest possible time. The usual crap you get from ER doctors if there is no real bodily damage. I’m sure they gave her something for pain as well though I cannot recall for sure. I took her home and waited for the fallout.
She was sent back to work with some restrictions by her doctor. It wasn’t more than a week or two before she claimed they were not meeting those restrictions and quit going to work. I think she claimed they sent her home. We could ill afford for Jane to go without any income, but that never mattered to her. Whether they sent her home or she quit showing up, they were not going to pay her.
Jane contacted a worker compensation lawyer and they took her case. Within a few days of her attaining the lawyer she started getting worker compensation payments. This was a relief to us financially, but the thought of another lawsuit didn’t exactly thrill me.
This one went much faster than the previous one. Her lawyer kept encouraging her to go to the doctor for anything that ailed her. Before I go further with this line of thought, I need to fill in a little back-story. I believe in one of these tales I mentioned that Jane has been grabbing her stomach in pain pretty much since the day we met. However, over the years she tended to find new sources of pain. Several years ago, she complained of pain in her hip. She felt as though someone was shoving a knife into her hip joint, was how she described it. At the time, I don’t think anyone found any reason for her pain and it finally gave way to another medical complaint. I believe the source was her grossly overweight mother having a double hip replacement a few years before her and I met. Whatever the cause of her hip pain, it was now documented in Jane’s ever thickening medical file.
With that said, early in the process she started complaining of pain in her hip even though it was not originally included in her list of injuries. In fact, during our depositions her lawyer was going over her file as we sat out in the waiting area and noted aloud that her hip pain was the opposite side of her body she originally complained of injuries. He gave this some moment of thought, then shrugged and murmured something to the extent that it shouldn’t matter. At that moment, I knew Jane and her lawsuit were dead in the water.
To further drive home the point of how this hip thing was going to go nowhere. We were at a family function with her parents. Her mom, never afraid to say what is on her mind asked Jane, hadn’t she complained of hip pain in the past. Jane looked angry and distressed then leaned into her mother and hissed for her to keep quiet about that. Because in Jane’s world, denying those things that are clearly documented will make them go away.
I accompanied her on several trips to meet with her lawyer. Every one of those her hip came up, by now her doctors decided that she needed a hip replacement. At the end of every one of those meetings with the lawyer he would say, “Go ahead with the surgery, everything will be fine.” Jane would thank him and we would be on our way. I wasn’t so sure “everything would be fine.”
We were a family of very limited resources. This whole process probably was a much bigger drain on our limited family resources than the previous lawsuit. Endless trips to doctors, some referred by her doctors, others by her lawyer, and a couple by the opposing lawyers for their evaluation. These trips to the doctor seemed further and further from home. Eventually she settled on a specialist that was based forty plus miles from our house. I was taking unpaid time off from work for many of these trips because she was sure she wouldn’t be able to drive after the visit, or she was scared and wanted me along. As with any of Jane’s medical issues, the drain on our resources was crippling.
One of those trips to the opposition’s doctor was but another nail in the coffin of Jane’s hopes of a big payday. They have the right to examine her and see if there were legitimate claims. Of course, no matter how legitimate her claims were, or anyone else for that matter, this doctor’s job was to debunk them. As was Jane’s wont, she overplayed her hand. She was in too much pain for her condition and suffered to severe of symptoms as a result of the doctors poking, prodding and pulling. I wasn’t in there with her, but saw her when she came out. She carried on about how much the doctor aggravated her already sore hip and of course how much of a dick he was. Anyone who didn’t see life the way Jane did was a dick, including me.
Hip replacement surgery is not small thing. Not only are there repeated trips to the doctor for consultations, you have to spend money to buy things insurance won’t cover to prepare for when the patient comes home. Her stay in the hospital would be three days and I would need to be there. In addition, and I knew this before hand, the several trips to the ER for postoperative complications that were fabricated in her mind. All this without the benefit of her former employers workers compensation payments…those were done by now.
Jane got her new titanium hip, but that was all she got out of this mess. The end was a hearing before some sort of administrative judge. I was not in on the actual hearing, but the look on the lawyers face when he and Jane came out did not look promising. It wasn’t, the judge ruled in the chain stores favor and awarded Jane no more compensation than what she received to date. There was no appeal, and Jane once again got to rail about how unfair life is as well as how she never received justice.
In the end, we were more broke than ever, Jane had one more thing to complain about physically, and I wondered what was next. This was just another fiasco in a long line of fiascos because if there were any guarantees in life with Jane, it was that Jane could not be happy unless she was miserable.
In addition, there is the whole hip recall thing to look forward to.
Chain gas stations/convenience store = 1
Jane still = 0
zeroptions 