Please watch the entirety of this,
because me and my fiance are 24 years old,
and we need help, and we're at a complete loss
that I am here on TikTok. So he is a wildland firefighter.
He has been first. This is gonna be a seventh year.
It is his entire heart, passion, career.
He started it right out of high school.
He's great at it.
And the last two years,
he's been able to not just fight fire during the summer,
but he's been able to be employed throughout the winter
and thin throughout the winter
or do some sort of fuel reduction throughout the winter.
This winter, he worked with the same crew.
They worked basically on the same unit all winter
because it was that thick.
And on April 2nd, one of the first trees to come up down of the day
was illegally cut by his coworker.
They performed a bastard cut,
so they did not face cut it,
and the tree fell backwards the wrong way.
Um, she was on the non unit side of the road.
And my fiance is the safest person I know,
and I knew the moment he said he got hit by a tree,
there was no way he cut it down.
And how in the hell
he was standing somewhere where a tree could hit him.
I already knew right away it was impossible.
How did that happen?
So there was an extreme amount of negligence surrounding the actual
Tree cutting that fell on his head.
These people cut trees down all winter long,
and this girl cut many corners on that tree,
and it because of that, it landed on my fiance's head.
She did not call out that she was cutting it,
didn't call out that it was falling the wrong way.
So it falls on my fiance's head.
And his crew just asks him if he's okay.
Nobody does an actual medical evaluation.
Nobody looks at his pupils.
They leave him out there all day.
He continues to cut trees for a couple hours,
but he's in severe pain and has a severe headache
and continues to tell his co workers that he called his boss and said,
I'm done. I can't.
I can't do anything. The tree fell on my head,
and I'm not okay.
And they kept him in the fucking field.
Then they end the day,
and they decide to stop and get ice cream on the way home,
while my fiance is passed out in the car
holding a C collar made out of his hoodie.
He wakes up in the ice cream parlor parking lot, livid.
They get back to work late because of that,
and his boss isn't there.
He didn't stay to see him fill out an incident report,
even though my fiance texted him and said,
I need to fill out an incident report when we get back to the station.
This is. I'm hurt.
Literally nobody acts like A tree fell on his head.
They'd let him drive home.
He comes in the door and I take one look at his eyeballs.
It's clear that he is not okay.
I drive him to the ER, and the ER is already horribly confused
on how he had a tree fall on his head at 9:00am.
And he is sitting in the ER at six thirty PM.
They treat him as a trauma and they make.
They scan his head and his neck to make sure that it's not broken.
And it's not, and he doesn't have a brain bleed.
So they say it's just a concussion.
Check in with your primary care.
And then he refers us to a retired doctor. We
check in with primary care.
They don't take workman's comp,
so we lost his primary care.
He has other health issues,
lost his primary care through this process.
And now we have a retired neurologist to go see.
On our own. We navigate finding different neurological care.
We come to find out that there's.
That is a whole in our community.
There's not very many people that our neurologist.
So we're seeing a PA that's a concussion specialist,
and she had been seeing us since the very beginning.
And then he begins to develop seizures.
We were told there are panic attacks
by the fire department that I drove him to.
And I looked at the firefighters and I said,
I've worked in the hospital and I've Seen panic attacks?
I've never seen one this severe,
but I'll believe you. No,
they were fucking seizures.
So our PA orders a head MRI,
and we're trying to find a neurologist through this time.
We get the MRI.
It's not good.
She says we'll need an EEG to confirm what's going on,
and we need to find you a neurologist.
So we decide to lawyer up because Workman's comp,
SAFE is not being helpful,
not helping us find any care.
They're supposed to help us.
So we find the best lawyer in the state to help us,
and he's done what feels like nothing.
He has not helped us find any care.
So within the last week or two,
I finally found a neurologist that would see him on workman's comp.
That is after calling probably eight different neurologists.
So we find this neurologist that will see him,
but he won't see him until September 17th.
And I, at this point,
I'm like, I'll wait.
I don't care. He's getting better.
He hasn't been having as many seizures.
The biggest issue is being in the car and driving.
Anyone that's had a head injury,
like, there's.
There's a lot of things, but, like,
the big thing that's holding him back from.
From living right now is driving. And.
And he's 24. He's a fucking firefighter.
This is big deal.
Then we get a letter in the mail Last Friday from SAFE,
who I called that week to help.
I wanted Help finding care.
And they said, I can't talk to you because you have representation.
I said, I'm sorry.
I didn't know that. I'm 24,
but okay. So
then they send us a letter in the mail
with three doctors appointments that are three hours away from us
and say we will be fined if we don't attend these.
So we call our lawyer this morning and say,
being in the car is the problem.
That's what's causing the seizures.
We can't attend these doctors appointments that are three hours away.
And we. We found someone finally,
but we can't attend three hour away doctor's appointments.
And he literally told us,
you have no other option than to get in the car and drive three hours.
You. Mandatory appointments.
They. They have to see you.
And I don't understand how.
How an insurance company can force someone to get in the car
when they're having seizures,
and they can't even find a doctor to explain the seizures,
explain anything, but, hey,
you have to get in the car and come see our doctors.
Five months later.
We haven't been able to find doctors to care for him since April,
and now they're demanding that next week we drive three hours away.
To end this off with more details
just to show the full neglect of this entire situation.
We made it to the ER twice the night of,
and then the first seizure,
I took him to the ER because I thought he was having a brain bleed.
I completely lost him in the passenger seat.
It was the scariest thing in my life.
Both of the really bad seizures he's had,
I've been driving the car.
His brand new car, by the way.
It's besides the point.
But the doctors also missed through this entire thing.
It wasn't until about a month and a half in
that we discovered that his clavicle was broken
from an impact from behind
and that he had a 2 degree AC joint shoulder separation.
I begged to differ. It's a grade 3.
His freaking clavicle is sticking out like this.
It's been months of discovering things.
He was fine. He was fine.
And every time we go back to the doctor,
we find something new that was from this injury.
I can't believe. How did the doctors miss his clavicle and his shoulder?
From the two ER visits he went in.
He has a head injury.
I've talked to so many people outside the hospital that are like,
if someone has a head injury,
you can't. You can't trust them to be able to recall everything.
A fucking tree hit him, dude.
And a clavicle. I have a friend that's a physical therapist,
and she said one of their first questions
they're supposed to ask if someone has a broken clavicle is
what else hurts?
Cause that is a traumatic injury to be broken from behind.