If you have been seriously injured in a motor vehicle accident, it can be difficult performing routine tasks that you used to take for granted. You may feel fatigued, frustrated and overwhelmed. At the same time your insurance company will be pressuring you to return to work and resume your daily activities.
You are used to meeting your own and other people’s expectations of you. Suddenly, as a result of ongoing limitations since the accident, you have to ask for help. Far too often, you and others in your situation will not get the help you need. In many cases, you will feel too embarrassed to depend on people. You will try to shoulder more than you can handle safely, dealing with the pain and other consequences that follow, for example, from simple household chores like preparing meals, making a bed or carrying groceries.
If you are seriously physically, psychologically or cognitively iimpaired following a collision, it can be crucial to your recovery to seek assistance from a reputable personal injury law firm. Your lawyers should be able to put a strong rehabilitation team together for you, and will fight to ensure your treatment needs continue to be met. They should have experience challenging the strategies that insurers use to deny your accident benefits claims.
We recommend that our clients listen to their treatment providers and their own bodies, and that they exercise caution at all times when attempting to resume familiar daily activities.
A simple example involves walking to the local supermarket and purchasing a couple of bags of groceries. Often, as your physical strength, balance and stamina improve through ongoing treatment, you will be encouraged by your progress and will want to take the next step towards "normal" life. However, just because you are feeling good at that time does not mean that the walk or carrying groceries is a good idea for your recovery. We see clients overtax themselves in this manner and suffer setbacks in their rehabilitation, often reaggravating existing injuries or even causing new ones.
The safer choice until you have been cleared by your treatment providers to resume these activities is to ask a family member or friend for assistance. We also recommend that our clients use an online grocery delivery service. These services are an excellent means of avoiding the potential negative consequences from trying to do it yourself. They will deliver the items to your home so that you do not have to carry anything heavy. Some are no charge. Others charge based on the amount purchased. If you do pay a fee, it can be submitted to your insurance company or recovered in your lawsuit.
Using a grocery delivery service has another potential benefit for you. If you are in a lawsuit against the other driver, his or her insurance company will try to capture you on video at some point. The video gets used to try and prove that you are not injured, or that you are exaggerating your degree of impairment. Sadly, your own insurance company is also likely to perform surveillance against you, to prove that you no longer require accident benefits.
Grocery stores are one of the most common locations for surveillance by an insurance company. They are crowded, and generally are close to your home, so that if you are being followed by an investigator, it can be difficult to notice anything unusual. And the evidence that gets produced, including getting in and out of the car, opening the trunk, loading and unloading the groceries, can be very incriminating when viewed in isolation from the rest of your life. What the video will not show is the increased pain you suffered the next morning, or the negative impact on your recovery.
At Campisi LLP, we take great pride in putting our clients first, by assisting you with all aspects of your recovery. If you would like to discuss...