
Most Illinois workers’ compensation injuries aren’t catastrophic. You may have a severe injury that requires surgery like carpal tunnel, a rotator cuff tear, etc., but eventually you should make a full recovery.
Some injuries are unique or have severe complications. And if those complications aren’t addressed right away it can have life long, tragic results. One such problem is cauda equina. And some lawyers and employers could be making the situation worse.
Cauda equina is an injury that occurs when nerves in the spinal cord get damaged. So you might lift something at work (e.g. a nurse lifting a patient, laborer lifting something heavy, etc.) or do another activity and get a back injury. That is probably the most common injury we see. With some of these injuries though, the pain and symptoms are unusual. We’re talking tremendous back pain, loss of feeling in your legs, significant numbness, urinary incontinence and other problems.
With normal back injuries, a delay of a couple of days to get treatment is no big deal. With the nerve injuries in cauda equina, if you don’t treat it with surgery within around 48 hours of the problems they can become permanent or get worse. For most people this means having a fusion right away.
The way cauda equina syndrome is diagnosed is your subjective complaints which leads to the doctor ordering a MRI. The MRI should take place without delay. The problem we’ve seen is that many employers insist that their workers go to company medical clinics after they are hurt and make them feel like they don’t have a choice to go to an ER or doctor of their own choosing (they do).
These clinics make a lot of money off of referrals from employers. So it’s been my experience that they are extremely conservative in their initial treatment of some injured workers. If you have a torn rotator cuff, it’s important to see an orthopedic doctor ASAP, but if the company clinic delays that by a week or two, it probably won’t change much ultimately. But if they delay you getting a MRI because it’s “too costly” it could result in you having irreversible damage.
When this happens, you may have a medical malpractice lawsuit. And it wouldn’t just be against a company clinic, it would be against any medical provider that delayed a diagnosis of it. You have two years from when that happens, so time is really of the essence.
And that leads to the second problem we see. Some of these lawsuits are against orthopedic doctors or other medical providers that your work comp attorney has a relationship with. They may get referrals from these doctors or use them for testimony in other cases, so they don’t want to piss the doctor off. In the work comp attorney’s mind, they are only representing you on the work comp case. So they don’t tell you to go look for a medical malpractice attorney because it’s not in their best interests.
The truth is that if your lawyer recognizes a legal issue, they should point it out to you, even if it’s not one they can help with. If they don’t it’s possible legal malpractice and either way it’s terrible representation.
We have helped a lot of workers with cauda equina and work with multiple Illinois medical malpractice law firms when there’s negligence that could have prevented things from getting so bad the problem is permanent. If you’d like a free consultation, please call us any time at 312-346-5578. We help everywhere in Illinois.