Anatomy of an injury-how this all began....

Good evening ladies and gentlemen...
this is a diary of my hubs injury and how it affects him every single moment of his life.

It all started 10 th october 2000,my hubs worked as a bricckie and general house maintenance builder for South Norfolk District Council...He loved his job,it meant he would get to meet all the tenants and had made alot of friends along the way...and as with all customers...some are brilliant and some are not,some live alone and some do not,and some live in houses and bungalows and some live in flats,but none the less they all live in council properties,which were maintained by the local council right up until 2005...and then they became Saffron Housing ...and although they still carry out the same job,they are not quite as speedy as the council was...but that is another story for later on in my life....
It started as any other day did,my hubs went to work at 7.30am to start work for 8.30...he had to travel to Long stratton and get his truck up and running,make sure there was a water supply and to pick up his daily work cards for his area....
He had one job to do in Harleston...which was to break up and re-lay a concrete ramp for a disabled lady...him and his labourer gary had everything they needed to break up a thin edged ramp.......And then they got there,and thats where the trouble began....Due to a typing error the concrete wasn't 2" thick as instructed...it was 14" thick.....so the boys contacted the depot and explained that they couldn't do the job without a kango,or a air driven concrete breaker...they pleasantly asked the tennat if they would mind letting them plug in their kango compressor into her electricity supply for a half an hour so that they could get the concrete busted to a size where they could safely handle it....
The tenant protested and refused to allow this action but still demanded that they do the job...after another call to the depot they explained what had happened and the head man at the time(who had a god complex...) told them that they would have to break up the concrete by hand...which involved a 5lb lump hammer with a long handle and a large crowbar......
they divided up the two jobs between them,one would swing the hammer and the other would lift the concrete from the ground with the crowbar so that the vacumm between the gound and the concrete was broken and the concrete would break rather than have the lump hammer just bounce off the solid ground and concrete.
Hubs decided that he would do the vacuum break with the crowbar and lift it 1/2" from the ground to allow the air in and allow the hammer to smash its way through.....unfortunatley neither of them could have known that there was a hairline crack already in the concrete...so when the lump hammer hit the concrete,the hairline crack gave way first,the lump hammer hit the tip of the crowbar,sending my hubs catapulted across the road ending up with him landing on a kerbstone in the centre of his spine........
On the instsance of his labourerf,hubs had to stop work...but the adrenaline had kicked in and they decided that the job could not be done in one go...as it was already 5.30pm...so gary and hubs went back to the depot...it wasn't until he tried to get out of his work van that the pain had started to kick in........hubs managed to get home and get into a hot bath to soak away the aches and pains....we had dinner and a evening in but he was in a lot of pain...so the following morning i called him in sick from work explaining that he had put himself into the injury at work book at the depot...but he was crippled wiuth pain he couldn't sit down let alone work that day....i took him to the doctors and they diagnosed back injury bought on by over strain and impact from the kerbstone...so they signed him off for a month.
After a month we were contacted by an injury lawyer about the accident(god knows how they found out....)and they said that if he was off for another month he might have a case for loss of earnings...but we weren't interested,so we politley said thankyou but no thankyou....the doctor put him off work for another 3 months and thats when the hospital visits started...he had a na mri scan which showed he had a cracked vertebrae in two places and three of his disc's had burst leaving him in incredible pain...and he was prescribed dihydrocodine for the pain...which helped a little but not a lot........