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Your Case
Insurance Company Jilts Brain Injured Customer
Refuses to Pay for Woman's Brain Injury Treatment
A Jury awarded over $1 Million to a woman whose insurance company committed what is often called "The Silent Epidemic": refusing to pay for treatment of brain injuries.
A local woman was sitting in the driver's seat of her family Toyota Sequoia, stopped for a red light at an intersection near the University of Oregon campus. She was rear-ended by a Cadillac driven by an underinsured motorist. It was a modest speed impact, but she immediately started to experience headaches.
The headaches continued, and worsened. She developed problems with her memory. She experienced a loss of energy, became more fatigued, and eventually had regular exhaustion. She developed problems with weakness, dizziness, and loss of balance. She began to experience abnormal sensations in the skin, including numbness, tingling, prickling, and burning or cutting pain.
What she did not know was that she was one out of about a million people who have two conditions that make them extremely vulnerable in a rear-end collision.
The first condition is called a Chiari I malformation, in which part of a person's brain is pushed down through the hole at the base of the skull where the spinal cord goes. The second condition is called Ehler-Danlos syndrome. With that syndrome, a person has loose ligaments and other connective tissues that allow excessive movement.
Her conditions were eventually diagnosed, and she was treated at The Chiari Institute in New York, the nation's leading medical center for this condition. Treatment included major brain surgery. Her medical bills to date exceed $200,000.
The insurance company for the negligent Cadillac driver settled, and then we asked our client's own insurance company to pay the balance of her losses. Her family had paid for a $1,000,000 underinsured motorist insurance policy. The insurance company refused to pay anything for her losses, and refused to submit the matter to arbitration, instead forcing us into a jury trial. At trial, the insurance company asked the jury to give no benefits under the insurance policy. Instead, the jury returned a verdict in her favor, in the amount of $1,020,000
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