I was working in a grocery store, and they had a special set-up where you sit in a chair inside of a booth. Well, my chair caught on the lip of my booth and flipped me in the air. I landed on my head.
I had to have staples in my head, and I partially lost my sight. I shattered the crystals in my ears, which created a bad case of vertigo. My traumatic brain injury caused a lot of problems – my speech was affected, my short-term memory was bad and I still have recall issues. There’s also a delay in my brain with motor activity. This means that I can tell my leg to move, but it takes a minute for my body to do what my brain tells it to. I at least got my personality back. Well, it’s not the exact same personality, but at least it’s some kind of personality!
After 30 days, my employer asked when I was coming back to work. At the time, they hadn’t even filed an incident report. And when they did, they just wrote “fell and bumped her head.” That was it. No mention of the fact that I was unconscious, or that they did chest compressions and had to call an ambulance. I was still in bad shape, but they threatened to take my job away. At the time, I was still walking with a cane, and had speech problems. My neck was so badly damaged, I had to have neck surgery to fuse my vertebrae. And here they were, threatening my job.
I had a friend tell me to call Allen & Allen. They knew someone who had a good experience, so I called. Brittany, Jessica, and Elyse were such a great team! Brittany was sweet and relaxed. I knew she was on my side. Elyse did such a good job, she even settled an old case with that same employer, for other injuries they didn’t want to take responsibility for!
Elyse was stern, and didn’t back down. She had the boxing gloves! Brittany knew I had recall issues, so she would send me lists of things I had to do, in case I forgot. Even when I had surgery, they called to check in on me. How nice is that? They did everything like clockwork and the case was settled in a year. The whole team, they were like family to me.
