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Can Your Marriage Survive Your Accident?
By Carole DiMaggio and LLoyd Rosenberg, Esq.
A silent casualty of a disabling accident is the effects it can have on your marriage. A serious injury that lingers for months or even years can often lead to marital disharmony, and in some instances, divorce. Understanding the nature of your injury, receiving and following the right medical advice, and obtaining a legal opinion on your options can make all the difference.
At the Personal Injury Law Center, we know that limited benefits may apply in certain accident situations. Even when you get all of the benefits you are legally entitled to, the financial stress on the household can affect a relationship fairly quickly. Our goal in the process is to immediately identify what benefits are available and provide a realistic time frame in which they can be collected. In this way, families can look at other resources and options, such as the healthy spouse taking on a second job, changing roles at home, restructuring the budget, or borrowing what will be needed to survive during the recovery period. We also help the clients identify what permanent changes need to be accepted and how to adjust to those changes.
Either marital partner can suffer a career altering injury, and the loss of one salary is going to change the family budget and dynamics considerably. We try to get the client involved in the process of vocational rehabilitation early on, directing them to insurance-provided or government-sponsored programs that can help them. Once the client sees new possibilities to provide value to the family there is a wonderful transformation in the attitude within the household that helps the couple overcome the adversity.
Other difficulties that marital partners face after a serious injury are caused by distrust and drugs. Sometimes it is the insurance doctor, and other times it is the well-intentioned family physician or occupational health nurse that state that an injured worker can go back to work without fully understanding the injury and work situation.
When the client is told he or she is capable of working, even if they do not agree, there is often pressure at home to do so as well. Unfortunately, there is a misguided perception that most people exaggerate their injuries, laying the foundation for the doctor, the employer, the insurer, and the spouse to accuse the worker of malingering. This lack of trust can lead to a denial of benefits for lost wages or medical treatment. T
The injured person may return to work before being fully recovered, which can lead to a significant worsening of the injury, or in some cases lead to permanent disability and often to depression. In some cases the client will turn to prescribed or illicit drugs to deal with the pain and limitations of their injury. Sometimes it is because they cannot get approved for the care they need. Other times it is because the outcome of surgery becomes less successful when there is a long delay in getting proper care. The drugs they take to function can also increase their feelings of depression and further limit the ability to recover. For those that are pre-disposed to addiction, this becomes a vicious cycle, and marriage suffers due to the personality changes of the disabled person, as well as the underlying disability caused by the injury.
Obtaining the right medical care can go a long way toward preventing or mitigating some of the situations described above. While it is important for you to seek competent experts that have experience treating your condition, it is equally important to find a practitioner who actually cares about you and understands the full consequences of an accident on your life.
A surgeon who does not want to “get involved” because of the paperwork they will have to complete in an accident case is not likely to help your cause or provide the documentation needed to support a claim for benefits. The good news is that there are many practitioners who do care and we know who they are.
At the Personal Injury Law Center, we start with the premise that you did not choose to be injured, that you need good medical and legal advice to make the right decisions, and you need the trust, support, and acceptance of your spouse for your relationship to survive as you recover or come to terms with a disabling injury.
Carole DiMaggio and LLoyd Rosenberg, Esq.
View all articles by Carole DiMaggio and LLoyd Rosenberg, Esq.
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