Tweet
My grandmother was joining us for a little trip to the local bowling alley and lunch, and an unfortunate incident occured.
We parked her in the handi spaces on the right side of the building, and discover the only ramp up is all the way on the left, and no spaces were free in front of the ramp. My grandmother has bronchitis and emphysema and COPD, so she carries around one of those little oxygen tanks wherever she goes. It was also just shy of 95 degrees out today and she just wanted to get inside so she settled for the stairs in front of her, figuring she could use the railing.
Now there were only four small stairs before you get inside, but both them and the railing were just past this long step that I guess was a landing of some sort. It also had this huge crack in it running from the edge to the first step and was about 3 inches wide at its widest point. Nontheless, it was there, and Grandma didn't see it because there was none of that yellow "lookit me, I'm a curb!" paint there on the edge. She thought it was just part of the parking lot...until her foot found it and she fell.
She scraped her knees pretty good, and two minutes after she fell an employee came out with an ice pack to see if she was okay, proclaiming that Gran was the second person to fall since they opened. This happened at 10:30 this morning; they opened at 10. Two people in a half hour. I met the other person who fell while waiting get bowling shoes; she was a woman in her mid 40s with special needs who too tripped on that same "hidden curb".
While we're helping her nurse her wounds and bandage her up my mom's helping her fill out the incident report with as much detail as she possibly could. More staff went outside to try and see how and where my grandmother tripped. The alley comped our game as an apology of sorts, but while my grandmother was holding the ice bags on her knees, I noticed that her left arm looked kinda wonky and weird. She tried to move it to look at it and yelped. I told Mom we should take her in to have it looked at. Didn't take much for her to cave in.
One visit to the ER and two hours later, we find out she suffered a radial head fracture - the tip of the radius that touches the elbow joint was broken from the fall. Well, Gran started spitting nails and seeing dollar signs. She wants to hire one of those "ambulance chaser" lawyers to sue the bowling alley for not repairing that curb. She's in a splint right now and is going to go back for a followup in 10 days to make sure the bone is healing, but she's outright furious. We have her staying with us right now so she gets used to being right handed (she's a southpaw) but she's already gone through our phone book looking for a lawyer.
How can I make sure she's civil about this? I hear so many stories on here about people that play the suing/lawyer card, but never thought I'd get roped into it on the opposite end of that. We've been in touch with the alley and kept them up to date with everything they were doing at the ER so they could include it in the report we wrote up before leaving, is there anything else?
We parked her in the handi spaces on the right side of the building, and discover the only ramp up is all the way on the left, and no spaces were free in front of the ramp. My grandmother has bronchitis and emphysema and COPD, so she carries around one of those little oxygen tanks wherever she goes. It was also just shy of 95 degrees out today and she just wanted to get inside so she settled for the stairs in front of her, figuring she could use the railing.
Now there were only four small stairs before you get inside, but both them and the railing were just past this long step that I guess was a landing of some sort. It also had this huge crack in it running from the edge to the first step and was about 3 inches wide at its widest point. Nontheless, it was there, and Grandma didn't see it because there was none of that yellow "lookit me, I'm a curb!" paint there on the edge. She thought it was just part of the parking lot...until her foot found it and she fell.
She scraped her knees pretty good, and two minutes after she fell an employee came out with an ice pack to see if she was okay, proclaiming that Gran was the second person to fall since they opened. This happened at 10:30 this morning; they opened at 10. Two people in a half hour. I met the other person who fell while waiting get bowling shoes; she was a woman in her mid 40s with special needs who too tripped on that same "hidden curb".
While we're helping her nurse her wounds and bandage her up my mom's helping her fill out the incident report with as much detail as she possibly could. More staff went outside to try and see how and where my grandmother tripped. The alley comped our game as an apology of sorts, but while my grandmother was holding the ice bags on her knees, I noticed that her left arm looked kinda wonky and weird. She tried to move it to look at it and yelped. I told Mom we should take her in to have it looked at. Didn't take much for her to cave in.
One visit to the ER and two hours later, we find out she suffered a radial head fracture - the tip of the radius that touches the elbow joint was broken from the fall. Well, Gran started spitting nails and seeing dollar signs. She wants to hire one of those "ambulance chaser" lawyers to sue the bowling alley for not repairing that curb. She's in a splint right now and is going to go back for a followup in 10 days to make sure the bone is healing, but she's outright furious. We have her staying with us right now so she gets used to being right handed (she's a southpaw) but she's already gone through our phone book looking for a lawyer.
How can I make sure she's civil about this? I hear so many stories on here about people that play the suing/lawyer card, but never thought I'd get roped into it on the opposite end of that. We've been in touch with the alley and kept them up to date with everything they were doing at the ER so they could include it in the report we wrote up before leaving, is there anything else?
Comment