Glad you stopped in, come back & stay longer, we missed you. Hope your back feels better, did you lift something heavy?

Linda

:) I missed you guys toooo!! I felt awful cause all I had time for was a quick glance at the topics, hehe.

nah, not from lifting. I was in two car accidents in the same week last may that eight months of therapy did nothing for :\ one of em involved a cement truck, the other was pretty severe whiplash from a rearend collision that totaled my friend's car. eh, it happens I guess. it's just the standing at work that gets me. it's also FREEZING in there and we're under the AC vent DIRECTLY. it just figures that standing and cold are the two worst things for my back, heh.

soooo, I'm on leave for at least a month so I can get back to therapy - I'm supposed to call HR every two weeks and let them know how I'm doing. I'm just not sure what to do about paying for the therapy cause I've already had to take two semesters off college cause my back was so bad, so I don't have health insurance anymore. do you think I could get a letter of protection from an attorney?

ehh, this is getting too personal now - I don't like to blather about my life in a public place, hehe. how's everything in GW land? :D

Ria

Wow, sorry to hear that. My daughter was in a car wreck in Nov (drunk driver hit her boyfriend's car). 2 broken legs & lots of bruises. It's taking forever to get it settled & in the meantime she has a huge stack of bills. There are a couple more of us here with no insurance so we can all sympathize with each other & hope it gets better. Take care of yourself.

Linda

thanks :) I'll try! and you too! hope your daughter's recovery goes well - and make sure she sues the pants off that somb*tch!! there are only a few things that piss me off quite as much as the utter irresponsibility and resulting casualties of drunk driving.

Ria

I hope you didn't sign any release from getting hit last year. I got rear ended about 20 years ago sitting at a dead stop waiting for the traffic to clear to turn. The car behind me was full of pregnant women. One was in labor and they hit me going about 60 then the I heard another crash and turned to look and the car behind them had slammed on the brakes and one behind him hit them and ran all of them into me. I was only one severely injured becaue of having my neck turned around when I got hit the second time I think but I was in shock and didn't know how bad I was hurt and was a nurse so I was getting the pregnant women out the car because there was a fuel leak and I was afraid it would blow up. I sent them all ahead in the first ambulances and me and another guy waited on the next one. I was sitting there just staring off into space and the ems guy put me in a c collar and wrapped me in a blanket in his truck. It was pouring down rain then the ambulance got there and strapped me on a backboard and thats when I realized I had a big chuck of glass stuck in the back of my head. It didn't even bleed. Well my ambulance got rearended in the rain but It wasn't bad but was stuck in a ditch so had had to wait for another one. Finally got to to the hospital and got fixed up and I was in a c collar and therapy for 6 months and had a severe concussion and whiplash. I was young and didn't know any better and thought I was fine. I had insurance and it paid everything but my deductible. I didn't get a lawyer and their insurance offered me five thousand if I signed a waiver of no future liability so I took it. I didn't know I had to pay back my insurance company out of that and ended up with nothing and that is why my neck is so messed up now. 20 years later. Good luck and if you didn't sign a release see if you can get them to pay for your therapy.

holy SH*T kristy... how can any one person have so much bad luck in one day!? that's HORRIBLE. after all that, the AMBULANCE got rearended TOO?! that's just... impossibly awful.

the first rearend accident happened when I was a freshman in high school. I was taking my feet off the dash and sitting up, with my butt lifted off the seat and my back twisted to the side, so all of my weight was on my arms and shoulders, and I had my head turned to the left looking at my mom, because we were mid-conversation and I turned to look and see why she abruptly stopped talking. I guess that's why my shoulders and arms are still so messed up. one side of my pelvis was higher than the other because my back was so much in spasm. but that accident was bumper cars compared to this last one. there was about a ten second screech and this guy just PLOUGHED us from behind. my friend slammed down the brakes and pulled the e-brake up and we STILL hit the car in front of us. totaled my friend's car, the frame was all bent to hell and the doors/hatch wouldn't close anymore. had to be hauled away on a flatbed. and you know what the son of a b said when he got out of the car? "oh, I was just looking at the sky and then there was a car in front of me."

can you BELIEVE it? then he left to play golf or go to a park or something. his car was barely damaged - just a cracked fog lamp or something.

I did get myself an attorney when the insurance company decided to arbitrarily pick seven and a half months as the cutoff time to stop paying my bills. which was ridiculous because it turned out they hadn't been paying them ANYWAY, and had just been sending them to my health insurance provider, which had stopped covering me because I took a year off of college cause of my back. so I don't know what to do.. they'll likely send the bills straight to me because I wasn't a full time student at the time.

and now I need to see someone to evaluate me to basically prove there's something wrong with me to justify the medical leave from work, but I have no idea what doctor will see me if I can't pay. and I don't even know who will accept a letter of protection from my attorney. if I can't find someone, work will probably just fire me instead of taking me back from leave.

what an f'ing mess. I can't get anything paid until I settle and I'm sure as hell not settling when I'm feeling like this, having to take so much time off work and being bedridden some days still. it's also a quality of life issue, as I have to take things one day at a time because it's depressing as all hell at 21 to think of living the rest of my life this way.

anyway, I'm done venting, I feel really weird spouting all of this publicly. I'm usually very private about things like this and never talk about myself, but if there's a chance I could pick up some helpful guidance, I'm all ears.

Ri

My friend found an attorney that set up her doctor visits and either guaranteed them or paid them not sure which since it was a clear case of her not being at fault when she was injured so she didn't have to settled. She was messed up for life and ended up overdosing 3 years later on alcohol and pain medicine. It was really sad. Call around and talk to some different lawyers about your case. I am not a person to sue anyone since so many people do it over bullcrap now days but if you were truly injured and have real medical needs that will be ongoing I would. My friend got a pile of money which did her no good since she was in constant pain the 3 more years that she lived. It was aweful. A guy driving a Fuji Film truck ran a red light and was drunk and T boned her. At least her son wasn't in the car with her. She was on her way to pick him up. The guy driving still had the vodka bottle in his hand and was still drinking it when the cops got there. Good luck.

Wow Kristy, your luck runs up there with mine - if it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all.

Daughter is back to work but has a few scars & her leg still bothers her. So far she hasn't seen a penny & I don't know how much longer before she gets money but for what she looked like, it isn't going to be enough. My beautiful little 20 year old baby girl with black eyes & half her face in scabs. I didn't see her until about 2 weeks after the wreck & I cried. I keep telling her to drive a tank in case someone else hits her.

I used to think you were safe in a car with all that metal wrapped around you. That was until I started driving in demolition derbies (in the 70s when they were still made of real steel) & reality set in.

Linda

Lol, My luck has gotten better since back then. It was a really hard time in my life already. Thank God I was driving a 1980 old ford police car that was built like a tank or I probably would have been killed. I hate people that sue for no reason but you never know how an accident like that will affect you years down the road if you have back and neck injuries especially and if I had to do it again I would do it differently I am ashamed to say. I am the queen of guilt and thought it would be wrong to sue pregant women when I had medical insurance and they offered me a little money on top of that. Turned out they all had minor injuries. Mine was only so bad because I turned around. I know the feeling about the brakes. I bent the metal part of the brake pedal I was pushing it so hard trying to keep from getting pushed into the oncoming traffic. The driver had looked back to check on the girl in labor and never even saw me sitting there with my blinker on she said. It was a 35 mph small road. Linda you drove demolition derbies? That is so cool. We sponsor one and give a friend of ours junk cars that we get and he fixes them up and I paint stuff all over them. Its a lot of fun but I wouldn't want to be in one, lol.

LOL I ran in many (dozens) of them, starting when I was 16 with a learner's permit. They used to have powderpuff derbies for the women & when there weren't enough women, I started running with the guys. It was so funny, I was 5-1 & 100 pounds dripping wet & these big hairy guys either said "I'm not hitting a girl" or "Kill the b**ch & show her not to mess with real men." Well, I've been in the paper & on TV twice & even won a derby at the race track (against all guys). I have lots of trophies & I usually won a little money.(big grin) I got out of them when I split up with my first husband. DH says he will fix a car if I want one but I'm 51 now so...

Linda

When I was in my early 20's in MA I worked as a bookkeeper for a guy that buit race cars with Hemi engines and raced in the circuit. I spent alot of my idle time watching the mechanics build the cars and they even taught me how to fine tune a Hemi and let me drive the cars on the track they had in MA (Not racing-just testing and running and I had the track to myself-no other cars!) Of course back then I was young, bullet-proof and invisible and running 120 MPH was thrilling! I never did have an accident on the track but it was scary at times doing those speeds.
Now at 60 I do 60-70!!! and obey speed limits!!!! I think demolitions is fun to watch on the tracks here locally but too scary for me!!

They have races here every Sunday. Back in the derby days, they had a powderpuff race. Friends with a race car tried to get me to take it. I told them I don't like to go fast, I only like to hit things (& only in the derby, clean driving record). I've never had a speeding ticket & I'm that annoying person in front of you who does the posted speed limit. My friends told me if I ever got a ticket, they'd pay it. I have an album with some of the cars but nothing I can post.

Linda

Thats cool. I guess we all thought we were young and bullet proof. Patty still races with JD my friend I hooked her up with, lol. I don't know if she rides with him in the demolition derby or not though. They have the powder puff derbies here too and have quite a few girls enter but most of them are young and still have good bones and muscles, lol.