Posts Tagged ‘oil fields’
Written By: Walter Twohorses
Correspondent
After 20 years of being a member of what truck drivers call the I40 social club, (I ran I40 a lot), I came off the road to get married, settle down and try to have what society considers to be a “normal life”. I found a small company that hauled limestone but it did not pay much. So I took the job and kept looking. Not long after that I found Trimac and decided that the oil fields were where I needed to be to make the real money.
In July 2007 I started training where I learned how to run the pumps, measure the oil and several other required duties. After two weeks I was turned loose with my own truck. It was a ‘96 Freightliner FLD that was originally an OTR truck and had been converted to run the oil fields. It was probably the biggest piece of crap I have ever driven and should have been “retired” a long time ago. I suspect that instead of buying new equipment, they would purchase older, worn out trucks from other branches of the Trimac company to show a profit and saved the company some money.
I drove this worn out Freightliner for a year with the air-ride seat bottoming out an average of 3 to 4 times a day. The impact to my spine took it’s toll over that amount of time.
One day I got out of the truck to hook up my hose. When I stepped down it felt like someone had stuck a very sharp knife in my back and I went down. I could not move. Other drivers at the pumping station helped me get up because I could not do it on my own. I have never experienced pain like that before and it scared the hell out of me. It was about half an hour before I could move. The other drivers helped me get back into my truck and I drove myself the 35 miles back to the yard. Good thing I know how to float the gears because I could not push in the clutch due to the pain and weakness.
I took a couple of days off work thinking that maybe I had just strained some muscles. I was wrong! A few days later I was at the Greely Medical Clinic being pumped full of all kinds of pain killers. Two weeks later my boss called and asked me to come back to work. He did not want me to be a black mark on their safety record. I agreed to come back to modified duty. That meant driving truck from the yard to the truck wash every day. How much pain could that cause? Lots, because I did not last a week.
It was two months before I got my first workman’s comp check and medical treatment because my boss had told the insurance company, AIG, that I was back at work. It was another 3 to 4 months before I was sent to see a back specialist. This doctor gave me the news that my 20 year truck driving career was over. The L3, L4, L5 and S1 discs were damaged beyond repair. No words of anger can describe how I felt. I wrote that truck up for faulty equipment more times than I can count and it was ignored by Trimac.
From July to November 2007 I received regular workman’s comp checks and medical treatment. But all the doctors that AIG sent me to wanted to fill me full of pills, mostly naproxen, and cut on my back. I did not want an invasive surgery. In November they shut off the checks and medical treatment because I would not take a modified position in the Trimac office. I was also informed that if I did take the office job, I would have to pay back the company back for keeping my insurance premiums up to date. I felt like this company did not car a bit about me and my injury. Why would I want to work for a company that did not care about it’s employees?
In March 2009 I was given a disability rating of 15% by the doctors AIG had sent me to. With this rating, AIG began sending me $1000 every two weeks, but that did not last long. August 2009 they stopped payment when I went to an independent doctor and he gave me a disability rating of 26%. This makes me wonder if the first doctor was taking a pay off to keep the rating as low as possible.
I really liked this independent doctor because he seemed to understand Native people and agreed with my continuing the homeopathic treatment I had started on my own. This treatment included acupuncture, chiropractic treatments as well as spiritual help. But AIG had it’s own ideas about my treatment and send me to yet another doctor. Once again the doctor just wanted to push pills down my throat.
Being frustrated and jerked around as much as I have, I went off on the doctor at my last appointment. The police were called and he sent me to the psychiatric ward for observation to make sure I would not harm anyone or myself. The doctors there kept me for six hours then released me.
My lawyer in still in negotiations with AIG for a settlement and says that with this incident she is upping the amount. I still have a long road ahead of me in reaching a settlement with AIG. Because of the restrictions on my back, getting and holding a job is not an easy task. With AIG jerking me around as they are, I am in danger of loosing everything I have. I have already lost my Harley and my credit rating has been ruined.
