Don't Get Hurt At Work In America

PART 1

A true story of an injured American worker from the notes and interviews of an injured worker, his wife, and report review.

Compiled and edited by a team of volunteers

Certain names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Table of Contents

Part 1

Prologue

Introduction: How The Workers Compensation Situation Got So Bad

Don’t Get Hurt At Work In America

Chapter 1

Chapter 2: Two Hours Spent With An Angell

Chapter 3: The Rehabilitation Specialist

Chapter 4: Confronting The Devil

Chapter 5: Melissa And Chicken Farming

Chapter 6: Ho Ho, Hi Ho It’s Off To Work I Go

Chapter 7: Sam’s Story, A Texas Worker

Chapter 8: Hot Mineral Baths.... Aaaaahhhh!

Chapter 9: Another Insurance Rehabilation Specialist

Chapter 10: Home After The First Surgical Fisco

Chapter 11: Getting Home Health Care

Chapter 12: Christmas Bonus Time

Chapter 13: Case Review

Chapter 14: St.Vincent’s Hospital Hotel

PROLOGUE

In Singapore, an injured worker has the option of suing civilly as well as filing a Workers’ Compensation case. It is their choice. They can also choose both or lose one, lose both. In America, the leader of free nations, there is no choice, nor is there any compensation for pain and suffering.

This is few words from an injured worker. Let’s call him Jay and his wife Melissa. They alternate the telling of this story. The names were changed to protect the innocent because they’ve already been ruined for telling the truth and backing it up with thousands of pages of documents.

Hi, I’m Jay. I just woke up covered in sweat from the neck up – hyperhydrosis. I’ve got a story to tell you and I don’t want to take a lot of your time - it’s already ruined the last 2 decades of my life.

Dr. Jay & Melissa

I want to thank Melissa for her tireless efforts in keeping me alive and helping with documenting this story. I certainly can’t find the correct words to acknowledge the woman who kept me breathing when the going got not only rough - but downright rotten. She was there when it was bad and when it got worse. And believe me, life with me is no picnic. It’s still horrible to live like this. After she left I took on the beast, the workers’ compensation system in Florida. Thinking back I wish I had the slingshot that David nailed Goliath with. (But, I would have aimed for the balls!)

I would like to also thank our friends for scanning, typing and doing the preliminary editing. Thanks to Stephanie Reynolds, in Dallas for advising me to reduce the use of expletives words and correcting one earlier version of this dialog. And others, who wish to remain nameless rather than face the horrors of FBI, Insurance Investigators, and terrorism in the name of keeping the secret brotherhood of thieves (insurance companies and lawyers) sacred.

Thank you all for helping.

Melissa: This is our story. This is what happened to my husband, Jay, when he was hurt at work in Florida.

Jay wasn’t working in his normal career; but it wasn’t normal times or circumstances either. We’d returned to my family home in Zephyrhills, Florida from Oregon because Jay’s dad and step-mother were very ill. Jay’s brothers lived too far away from Florida and couldn’t always be there for their Dad if an emergency arose.

Jay: We’d been in Oregon for seven wet and freezing months. Melissa intensely disliked Salem, Oregon. We both felt we were bereft of spirit and feeling there. We had loved Eugene passionately though and during those first few months in Oregon, I’d finish work in Salem working for the Department of General Services of the State of Oregon, and both of us would drive to Eugene where I’d teach a Speed Reading or Accelerated Learning class at the University in Eugene.

I loved teaching - the University - especially the youthful enthusiasm of the open-minded students.

The energy, vibrancy, and vitality was great. Melissa went with me to most of the classes and she also enjoyed the student energy.

Melissa missed going back to school to complete graduate education; but we were sure that it was in her future. The feeling of being on campus lifted her spirits that were depressed by Salem. Also, because in Eugene we felt safe hugging the students without the hassles that accompany a simple hug today.

It wasn’t that way in my current day job. I had got written up for hugging friends who worked with me at different state agencies.

But when Melissa and I finished teaching for the night in Eugene, we drank gourmet coffee and ate late night desserts in downtown Eugene with the students. Life wasn’t too shabby when you’re teaching and earning respect from young, alive, energetic people.

Melissa: During the day Jay was Purchasing Analyst III, highest level purchasing agent for unrestricted dollar contract amounts for the State of Oregon and the Department of General Services. He specialized in forms, systems, and printed needs that required extensive background training. Jay had been in that field since being a teenager, in college, and until he became a therapist.

Being a purchasing agent and a therapist isn’t easy in state government. And getting a hug, that was rare, was often frowned upon. But at night, and on the weekends Jay changed into a old wise teacher of accelerated learning skills, speed reading, self-confidence, and other unique courses that students loved.

Jay: Although we loved Eugene, Melissa missed her family in Florida, and she had just flown back at Thanksgiving to see them.

About that time I realized that I needed to be with my ailing father and step-mother who were very ill, and that was three thousand miles away and worse than sickly I was told that death was imminent.

It was almost as if my wife prayed to leave.

Then day before Christmas, after being with the State of Oregon five and a half months and two weeks before getting Union membership to protect me, I was fired. That was the day after I awarded the State’s largest forms contract, in excess of $1,000,000 annually, to the lowest bidder, a small Eugene Company, established for 70 years.

Moore Business Forms, the world’s largest producer of forms and systems mysteriously had the contract for over a decade with the prior purchasing agent. I guessed that it was simply renewed with a cost of living increase and never put to public bid or opening up prior bids to potential vendors. This had continued to escalate the State’s annual printing costs without allowing fair competition. And the first few months made Jay aware of Moore’s high error and misprint rate – and who paid for errors: TAXPAYERS. Bid the contract out - screamed Jay! He awarded it and got terminated in 24 hours.

One month earlier I awarded the state’s largest printing job, the hunting/fishing licenses to a different manufacturer, other than Moore, and saved the department a $100,000 on that contract alone just on the cost of specialized numbering systems that were completely unnecessary as simple excessive waste by the using department. I negotiated with them and found a less costly numbering system and the savings exceeded $100K!

The Department of Fish and Wildlife adored the attention I paid to their budgetary needs. The state had been paying non-competitive prices until I arrived. Nobody seemed to care or even notice. In six months I saved the state in excess of $250,000 through all departments on $3,000,000 in purchase.

Don’t do that if you want to keep your government job! You screw up their demands for more tax dollars.

I was production and corporate trained. I had always been responsible for my own cost of errors in the past, so I always double-checked state purchasing laws in my dealings. Still, from past records I couldn’t ascertain why one vendor in particular seemed to be suspiciously above the law. More than once I was asked to just make out POs to them without requesting bids.

HELL NO! was my response. I was not going to risk my job by violating the law. By following the law I was terminated. I even spend personal time preparing an educational program to be taught at the public school and was negotiating with the Department of Education to donate for student benefit.

The woman who was the department head claimed that the reason for termination was my personal use of the computer

for donating educational courses to the state, on my own time. All of the department directors spent 10-20 hours a week played Tetris on government computers.

She terminated me – and strangely enough God terminated her, shortly thereafter, with Cancer. God does work in mysterious ways.

It was obvious that something was highly suspect about the relationship between the recently retired purchasing analyst whom I replaced. He only earned an average of $18,000 a year for a decade and had over a quarter of a million in cash assets including a $50,000+ Classic Porsche Targa and a huge home and Christmas Tree farm.

On the other hand I believe in earning my living rather than stealing it from the taxpaying public. As the new Purchasing Analyst, certainly previously favored vendors had a hard time with my purchasing savvy and expertise and my refusal to cooperate with their game.

Some were upset that I didn’t make errors like the prior Purchasing Analyst and have to pay for reprints, doubling the profits for them.

To one factory, I honestly commented on how their old, slow and costly to set-up, inefficient equipment printed the quality of a rubber stamp. And that that scrap heap of metal should be shipped to 3rd world nations as surplus.

I think I hurt their feelings but they already knew their equipment was antiquated.

Gee, it was built before WWII and most manufacturers had equipment that was under 15 years old.

Less than a week later, we opened the big contract. Within a few hours I was fired. I know I hurt this company’s profit statement and made it so that the State of Oregon wouldn’t have to increase printing budgets for so many departments; so they helped to disappear me from the State of Oregon.

In just under 6 months with the State of Oregon, I had the state buying from the most competitive of approved vendors and I saved taxpayers over a quarter million dollars, and god knows how much on that one big contract alone .... without really trying.

Integrity is not trying - it’s a natural flow.

Melissa: Jay won’t talk much about the sadness of being fired from a job he was really able to shine at. Jay was devastated. But, I was enthusiastic about leaving Salem. We balanced each other, don’t you think?

Although Jay really loved his work, he was taught a lesson.... that honesty and integrity don’t go far in government. And also that maybe you shouldn’t hug your friends or your wife at the office. It’s again the rules in Oregon give a holy hug.

But despite his great loss of a job he did extremely well, Jay stayed cool, We needed a vacation and to do some car repair on our ’65 Karmann Ghia so why not go back to Florida via Mexico.

WAKING UP THE SLEEPING LION

Jay’s dad, Abe, was recuperating from having brain surgery related to two embolisms. Actually, that’s how I met Abe, in a hospital, in a coma. Jay thought it would be safer for me that way. Abe had been in a coma for 29 days in total.

After about two weeks in the coma, Jay brought me there. He didn’t wake up; he just made kissy, kissy sounds with his lips while he was unconscious. Boy, that was strange.

But even stranger was the story of how he woke up from the coma after 29 days, with his next door neighbor bitching about the cost of re-roofing the condominium building they all lived in, and how the distribution of cost was unfair for some of the smaller apartment owners. Although Jay wasn’t present, apparently Abe woke right up and said, I’ll handle that! Or something to that affect. At age 90, Abe was the building President and Treasurer.

Now, Jay’s stepmom Mildred was dying from Breast Cancer which was very advanced. We were sure Jay’s father could use someone near for support, even if it was his black-sheep son, Jay.

This would be the second wife Abe would lose due to metastasis of breast cancer and although Abe’s love for Mildred was certainly different than it was for his first wife, Evelyn, of 32 years of marriage, he had great respect and admiration for Mildred, his wife of over 20 years.

Although Jay and Abe never saw eye-to-eye, they sure could raise their voices discussing the differences. And there were always differences.

Jay: When we left Oregon I was amazed at Melissa’s ability to compress massive quantities of belongings into our minuscule Karmann Ghia. Although we donated almost $1000 worth of pots and pans, dry goods, canned goods, clothing, and more to a homeless shelter, Melissa still had more cartons packed to be mailed East containing books and rocks.

It was the weekend, the post office was closed. But Melissa was an excellent packer. The Ghia was packed tighter than a drum. She had cartons under her feet and one on her lap. After several hours we stopped near Mt. Shasta, California and mailed out four cartons of books and rock collection specimens to her folks back east. As we drove south into Mexico, I was still in awe that our car was still heavily packed. But now Melissa was no longer packed in with the boxes.

Melissa: We needed to get some major repair for the Karmann Ghia and Mexico was the way to go. On the way we stopped for dinner at a Red Lobster in southern California and found electrical-smelling smoke coming from the rear right taillight. The next morning we drove over the border and aimed south for cheap mechanics, huevos rancheros, and a few days of rest.

Mexican food wasn’t great when you eat at restaurants you don’t know as you travel, but car