Our client was struck by a company truck and has experienced continuous pain since the incident. The crash caused her chronic pain and limited mobility that required extensive treatment to manage the pain, including physical therapy, injections, and other pain management interventions.
Imaging after the crash revealed disc bulges in both her cervical and lumbar spine, a labrum tear, and partial rotator cuff tears. She has ongoing pain in her neck, back, hip, and left shoulder.
This is the kind of case insurance companies work hardest to minimize, because the injuries do not photograph well and the person appears fine from across a room. The Townsley Law Firm recovered a settlement of over $875,000.
What Radiculopathy Actually Means
Radiculopathy is what happens when a spinal nerve root becomes compressed or irritated, usually by a disc that has bulged or herniated into the space the nerve occupies. The nerve does not simply hurt where it is pinched. It sends pain, numbness, tingling, or weakness along the entire path it serves.
Cervical radiculopathy, from the neck, radiates into the shoulder, arm, and hand. Lumbar radiculopathy, from the lower back, radiates into the hip, leg, and foot. This is why a person with a disc problem in the neck reports arm symptoms, and why a lower back injury produces hip and leg pain. The nerve carries the injury outward from the spine.
Our client had disc bulges at both levels and a disc extrusion. That means two separate nerve pathways were affected, which is consistent with pain distributed across her neck, back, and hip rather than concentrated in one place.
Radiculopathy is real, measurable, and often stubborn. It can be documented through imaging, physical examination findings, and nerve testing. It also frequently resists resolution, which is why treatment escalates from therapy to injections to ongoing pain management, exactly the progression she went through.
Two Tears in One Shoulder
Alongside the spinal injuries, our client sustained damage inside her left shoulder: a labrum tear and partial rotator cuff tears.
The labrum is a ring of cartilage that deepens the shoulder socket and helps hold the joint stable. A tear can cause pain, catching or clicking, weakness, and a sense that the shoulder is not secure.
The rotator cuff is a group of four muscles and tendons that control the shoulder’s movement and keep the joint centered. Partial tears cause pain with overhead reaching, weakness lifting, and difficulty sleeping on the affected side.
Both are common in crash injuries, where a body braced against a steering wheel or restrained by a seat belt absorbs sudden force through the shoulder. Both can persist for years, and partial tears put patients in a frustrating middle ground: significant enough to limit daily function, not always clear-cut candidates for surgical repair.
Why Chronic Pain Cases Get Undervalued
Insurance companies build their arguments around what is visible. A shattered femur is undeniable. A disc bulge with nerve symptoms invites a different playbook: the injuries are called degenerative, the pain is described as subjective, and the fact that the person is walking and working is offered as proof that nothing serious happened.
None of that reflects how these injuries actually work. Chronic pain and reduced mobility change what a person can lift, how long they can sit or stand, how well they sleep, what work they can perform, and what parts of their life they have to give up. Those losses are compensable under Louisiana law, including physical pain and suffering, mental anguish, and loss of enjoyment of life.
What defeats the minimization argument is documentation. Consistent treatment records. Imaging that shows the physical findings. Examination notes connecting symptoms to specific nerve levels. A treatment history that escalates in the way a genuine, persistent problem does. And credible evidence of how the pain has changed daily life and the ability to work.
Because the driver was operating a company truck, the claim also reached beyond an individual’s personal policy to the employer and its commercial coverage, which matters when injuries require years of care.
