Working in the warehouse for a busy exhibition company, I'm used to coming home from work with bumps and bruises; it's all part of the job and it's not something you really complain about. Some days you get more damaged than others, but it's never anything too major. One day a poorly stacked flight case fell on me and left me with a spinal injury called posterior cord syndrome and my life changed dramatically.
I was putting a few pieces from a recent show back on some shelves one afternoon last winter, and somehow a three metre high flight case which was stored standing up on the floor overbalanced and fell forwards, hitting me hard in my lower back, knocking me to the floor. It took two people to pull the case off of me and as I instinctively tried to stand up, I knew something wasn't right. I could move my legs a little, but not the way I wanted to, and there was simply no way I could stand up.
One of my colleagues called an ambulance suspecting that I had a spinal injury of some kind. Though I tried to protest and say I was just winded, I knew I was trying to convince myself that I was alright as much as I was anyone else. Seriously injuring my back would change my life completely; absolutely nothing would be the same. I might not be able to walk - the third floor flat I lived in would have to go, the Sunday afternoon football
games would be a thing of the past and I began to panic about what I'd do for money.
I laid there for half an hour - still trying to get up, despite how much my friends tried to stop me - while we waited for the ambulance to arrive. I was rushed to hospital where I was diagnosed with a spinal injury and, after a lot of tests, it was determined that I had damaged the posterior of the cord, partially tearing through it.
Suffering a spinal injury obviously meant that I was unable to work in my warehouse job, and I soon began to worry about finances. My colleague who witnessed the accident explained that it only happened because someone had been negligent in their storing of the flight case - it should never have been stood up like that, especially without being secured in some way and he suggested talking to a solicitor.
We found a lawyer specialising in spinal and brain injury cases and he arranged some financial aid for me while the legal proceedings were happening. This really helped and the solicitor seems very confident that my claim will be a success. Along with the support of my family and friends, this has helped me greatly while going through both the legal proceedings and the rehabilitation process. Though I'll never be able to work in a warehouse again, it's hoped that I will recover enough to walk unaided and find myself a different type of job in the not too distant future.
Author Resource:-
Thomas Pretty is a former warehouse worker who recently claimed for compensation after a sustaining a spinal injury in the workplace. Find out more about spinal injury at http://www.stewartslaw.com/
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