Spinal Cord Injury and South Florida Work Accidents

Unless you know someone who is living with a spinal cord injury, you probably don’t know how disruptive it is to virtually every aspect of your life.  With appropriate medical treatment, people with spinal cord injuries can live a normal life span.  Three famous people, namely the author Chinua Achebe, the musician Curtis Mayfield, and the actor Christopher Reeve, each survived more than a decade after the accidents that left them paralyzed because of spinal cord damage.  Almost any kind of traumatic accident can cause a spinal cord injury, including accidents at work.  If you have suffered a spinal cord injury as a result of a workplace accident, contact a South Florida workers’ compensation lawyer.

Different Types of Spinal Cord Injury

If you suffer a traumatic injury to the spinal cord, it will affect feeling, movement, and function in all the parts of your body below the site of the trauma.  Therefore, if the site of the injury is the lower back, the affected body parts will be the legs and lower abdominal organs.  A neck injury can result in spinal cord damage from the neck down.  The most severe kind of spinal cord injury, called complete spinal cord injury, can cause complete paralysis (lack of feeling and inability to move) of the whole body from the site of the injury down.  The term “paraplegia” refers to paralysis of the lower body, including the legs, feet, hips, and lower parts of the torso.  Quadriplegia, also known as tetraplegia, is paralysis of all four limbs, namely the arms and legs; it results from a spinal cord injury above the shoulder.

Even if your spinal cord injury is incomplete instead of complete, meaning that you are still able to move your arms and legs, the injury may make it very difficult for you to continue working at a manual labor job.  Even if you are not paralyzed, spinal cord injury can still cause other debilitating symptoms:

• Chronic pain
• Weakness of the affected body parts
• Loss of bladder and bowel control
• Loss of sexual function
• Muscle spasticity

Workers’ Compensation Disputes About Spinal Cord Injury

Spinal cord injuries can result from a worker falling from a ladder or from a piece of equipment falling on a worker.  Your employer has a legal responsibility to carry workers’ compensation insurance, which pays for treatment of all injuries sustained by employees while they are doing their jobs in the workplace.  Even for a severe injury like a spinal cord injury, it is usually not difficult to get workers’ compensation insurance to cover acute treatment for the injury, such as your hospitalization immediately following the accident.  The disputes usually arise when it comes to the ongoing management of permanent injuries that limit your ability to work.  In this case, it is helpful to work with a workers’ compensation lawyer.

Reach Out to Us Today for Help

A Sunrise workers’ compensation lawyer can help you if you have suffered a spinal cord injury as a result of an accident at your place of employment.  Contact the Law Offices of David M. Benenfeld for assistance with your case.

Resource:

unitedspinal.org/what-is-spinal-cord-injury-disorder-scid/