Judge Awards $1M+ for Chronic Pain
Jane Fraser’s Motor Vehicle Accident
On January 15, 2015, while driving to work, Jane Fraser was involved a motor vehicle accident. Upon impact, she struck her head on the driver’s side door and her chest and left knee on the steering wheel. She felt a jolt to her lower back. She called her son to pick her up from the accident scene and take her home. The following day, she returned to work as a machine operator. She continued to work until March 13, 2018.
During those approximately three years, Jane regularly followed up with her family physician who would go on to diagnose her with fibromyalgia, chronic pain syndrome, and depression. Her family physician was unable to manage her symptoms with prescription medications and physiotherapy. By March 13, 2018, Jane could no longer withstand the intensifying low back pain, constant headaches, and left shoulder pain. She therefore made the difficult decision to stop working and apply for disability benefits.
Jane’s story is one of hard work and perseverance. She left her home country of Grenada at the age of 29 to create a better life for herself and her children. When she arrived in Canada in 1990, she immediately began working the following Monday. With time, she found herself at a company that manufactured automotive parts. She began this job in October 2000. At the same time, for a period of two to three years and to make ends meet, she took up a second job providing private nursing care to an individual until he passed away. By the time of the accident, she had been working as a machine operator for nearly 15 years.
It is in this context, and with this background, that Jane persisted with work post-accident. She pushed herself to work every day, getting herself through approximately three years of work by wearing a waistband, getting massage therapy, using vacation days to rest (she did not have sick days), using Tylenol #3, and relying on her work crew to send her to the washroom for breaks whenever they saw her struggling. She simply felt that she had no other choice but to work with pain.
Unfortunately, because Jane’s identity was tied to her work ethic, once she gave in to her bodily pain, her depression truly set in to fill the void. Within months of stopping work, she was referred to psychiatry and psychotherapy for treatment. She was also referred to a speech-language pathologist due to her difficulties with auditory comprehension and information processing, expressive language, reading/writing, verbal reasoning and executive functioning, and social communication.
Because of the accident, Jane stopped engaging in the recreational and social activities in which she participated prior to the accident, including hosting family dinners and actively contributing to her church, which had been a central feature in her life. Because of her financial situation after she stopped working, she fell into arrears with her rent began facing eviction notices for the first time. She was therefore forced out of her apartment in which she lived independently and into a low-income apartment with two roommates. Her quality of living deteriorated significantly.
While Jane’s life was unravelling, Singer Kwinter was working towards securing a fair and reasonable compensation to account for her pain and suffering, economic loss, and future care needs. In January 2022, we began a four-week trial before a judge alone. After eight days of trial, liability was admitted by the defence. However, they took the position that the chain of events that followed the accident were not as a result of the accident. Rather, they suggested that Jane’s condition resulted from earlier motor vehicle accident in which Jane was involved in 2012, despite all the evidence being that she had fully recovered within six months of that accident. The defence also took the position that Jane was malingering, i.e. intentionally grossly exaggerating her symptoms or intentionally misattributing genuine symptoms to the 2015 accident.
On March 2, 2023, the Honourable Justice L. Shaw issued a judgment in favour of Jane in the total amount of $1,009,250.
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