Precedent South Carolina Workers' Compensation “Victory” for Lyme Patient Part 1

by Kathleen Liporace

Phil Wood was an active, energetic South Carolina citizen who had nary a doctor visit before contracting Lyme disease while on the job as a timber buyer for Canal Wood in Greenwood, SC. His employment duties included cruising tracts of land on foot and assessing the value of timber for potential purchasing by his employer. As a Timber Buyer, Wood faced a largely unknown risk of being bitten by a Lyme carrying tick, because such a danger is generally unrecognized in South Carolina.

After being diagnosed with advanced or chronic Lyme disease, an assistant was assigned to Phil and he was given the opportunity by his employer to work a modified schedule, based on his limiting physical condition. Specifically, Phil was reassigned to telephone business communications with customers whom he had served for years. Wood also went into the office weekly to make sure that accounting was done and loggers were paid. He performed his job so well that he was given a pay raise. Phil's productivity is part of the legal record in his disability struggle that began in December of 2004.

Since Mr. Wood acquired Lyme disease on the job, his health insurer delegated the responsibility for health related expenses to his Workers' Compensation plan. As a result, Wood was abandoned by his health insurer and left to deal with both illness and Liberty Mutual, the Workers' Compensation carrier. Because of this course of action and ultimate cessation in reimbursement , Phil and his wife Kim were forced to pay for both doctor visits and medicine out-of-pocket. It was their hope that it would be a tolerably short period of time. However, that hope turned into an acrimonious and protracted legal battle.

Despite being a diligent employee with a medical disability, Phil's job was terminated. It was noted that his office was slated to close and that Wood was to be part of a down-sizing, yet others have been hired subsequent to Phil being laid off. Additionally, the office remains open thus far. Prior to his job being unexpectedly terminated in April of 2007, the church that Phil and his wife attend paid for plane tickets for Kim to accompany Phil to see another Lyme literate physician, Dr. Steven Phillips in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Given this devastating and simultaneous dual impact of a debilitating illness and loss of livelihood, Phil's church stepped in to offer financial assistance. Mr. and Mrs. Wood paid the cost of the hotel, rental car and food during the trip to the Connecticut physician, and further paid the $600.00 doctor bill. These out-of-pocket costs to this day have not been reimbursed by Liberty Mutual. Dr. Phillips concurred that Phil indeed had contracted Lyme disease and that his symptoms were and are consistent with this disease. He further wrote a letter to sustain the diagnosis of Lyme to support Mr. Wood in his legal proceedings. Before seeing Dr. Phillips, Phil had received the same consensus opinion on his diagnosis first from his primary care doctor and subsequently by a Lyme literate Infectious Disease doctor in North Carolina.

As is tragically typical for advanced cases of Lyme Borreliosis, Phil has suffered with multiple unremitting physical issues. A list of these problems includes: body swelling, mental confusion, tingling and numbness of the hands, migraine headaches, dizziness, muscle pain, joint pain, chest pain, ringing of the ears, nausea, fever, and of course unrelenting fatigue. As a consequence of Lyme disease, Phil also had to have his gallbladder removed, not an uncommon occurrence... He experiences other issues such as multiple rashes, intracranial pressure, blurry vision, sinus infections, and left knee, calf and foot problems. Mr. Wood frequently struggles with brain fog. He also has experienced such serious bouts of vomiting and dehydration that he has required intravenous infusion of fluids. There were many times that Phil was so seriously ill that he didn't know if he would wake up the next morning. He has been hospitalized by severe reactions to medicine. One such example is that he broke out with an excruciatingly hyperesthetic rash from head to toe. This necessitated him to receive maximum doses of Benadryl for approximately five days while being vigilantly monitored in the hospital. It took two full weeks for that rash to fully dissipate. It is abundantly clear that Mr. Wood has suffered greatly due to Lyme Borreliosis. His unimaginable suffering, shared by his wife Kim, has been compounded by the torturous legal issues and attendant delays in gaining income for daily living caused by the obstructionist behavior of his disability carrier.

As part of this nightmare, termination by his employer has caused Phil and Kim Wood to sell many of their possessions in order to avoid bankruptcy. Additionally, in view of the fact that his disability insurer stopped paying his medical claims, Phil's credit has suffered significantly. He also had to spend thousands of dollars to hire an attorney to compel Liberty Mutual to acknowledge their contractual obligation to pay for his medical bills and provide benefits during his involuntary illness and associated disability. Despite the positive precedent outcome of the case in favor of Wood, there still remains a struggle. He now has income for daily living, yet no payments have been made for medical coverage or cost of prescriptions. Liberty Mutual remains in derogation of full court orders.

Unfortunately, this scenario of bad faith, job loss, incapacitation and near, if not total, bankruptcy plays itself out in the lives of many chronic Lyme patients. This is the shocking, but typical experience of many who suffer from various forms of persistent illness.