Spinal Cord Injuries Can Be Devastating: Don’t Be Left Helpless.
If you are reading this, you or a loved one has likely suffered a spinal cord injury. As you know, there really isn’t any such thing as a minor spinal cord injury. They are usually devastating and life-altering. Sometimes, spinal cord injuries occur and no one is at fault but, when a spinal cord injury is caused by the negligence of another person, we are equipped to spring into action to help.
Spinal cord injuries can occur in a number of ways but, in the legal world, there are two primary types. Spinal injuries caused by medical malpractice or a defective medical device and traumatic spinal cord injuries, like those caused by an accident. By the very nature of its description, spinal cord injuries result from a fracture or injury to the spinal cord and/or the nerves in the spinal cord or spinal canal.
Traumatic spinal cord injuries can occur in just about any way that any other injury could occur. This includes passenger, commercial, and truck wrecks, on the job falls, torque injuries, and blunt force trauma, among others.
In medical malpractice cases, the injury is the result of medical treatment or surgery. It is important to distinguish that nerve damage is a known and accepted risk of certain procedures and resulting injury is not always negligence. However, if a mistake was made or the doctor failed to recognize a complication or failed to properly treat a complication, there may be negligence. This is especially true if the patient did not consent to the risk and if the patient ended up with permanent injuries.
Our lawyers have handled devastating spinal cord injuries arising from all kinds of different circumstances, and they all stand out because of the absolutely devastating nature of their injuries:
- A gentleman who was up on a very tall ladder painting a commercial building when his paint sprayer wand made contact with an electrical wire. He was knocked off of the ladder and paralyzed from the neck down.
- A gentleman working on a roof and the employer did not provide any harnesses or other fall protection. He fell off of the roof and sustained a devastating broken back with resulting neurologic damage.
- A gentleman who went in to have a spinal cord stimulator implanted and it was done incorrectly causing damage to his spine which paralyzed him from about the chest down.
- A doctor doing a routine back surgery sutured up one or more nerves, tethering them together, and then failed to recognize it. The patient, my client, ended up with permanent and severe spinal nerve injuries.
- A spine surgeon injured the spinal cord in the process of doing a routine neck surgery for a herniated disc. The patient was unable to resume his previous work because it required labor and climbing on tall ladders.
- A patient was severely injured during a cervical epidural steroid injection because she was overly sedated and the surgeon injected the needle full of steroids