Troy Allender

After numerous doctor appointments and tests that led nowhere, Navy veteran Troy Allender woke up from a nap with his legs tingling.

“I never walked again,” he said.

By the time his legs stopped working he had been to the emergency room several times, and many other visits to the doctor, driven by the undiagnosed pain in his back. At each visit to the ER his white blood count was going up and up.

“I tried to stay out of there but would have to go to the ER when the pain got so bad I couldn’t stand up anymore. They would give me pain meds and send me home.”

When his wife Tami called his doctor, alarmed and frightened, the day he couldn’t move his legs, they were told it was probably a result of constipation from the medication he’d been prescribed. The doctor recommended putting him on a toilet to see what would happen. Tami and her son weren’t able to move him to the bathroom so they set up a camp toilet in the middle of the living room.

“Can you imagine?” Tami says. “They told us sitting on a toilet would help him walk again. I said this is ridiculous and called 911.”

When they got to the hospital, things weren’t much better, Troy says.

An MRI was done but was done at the wrong level and missed the abscess.  The hospital knew it had to rule out whether Troy had an abscess because a spinal abscess is a medical emergency and knew the radiologist was leaving for the night, and that no specialist would see him overnight. If the hospital wasn’t going to have him seen by a specialist and rule out an abscess, Troy needed to be transferred to another hospital.”

All the while, he could not feel his legs and was losing sensation. They said he reported he couldn’t feel his legs but never tested. He sat in the hospital, without being seen by a specialist until the next afternoon. But they knew this was more than simple back pain so they stood their ground and demanded a second test. This is the one that showed a massive epidural abscess that had been pressing on his spine.

As a result of that lack of care, he is now permanently paralyzed from the ribcage down.

“When a new doctor finally figured out what was wrong, it was too late,” he says. “They told me that this all could have been avoided but here I am.”

Life in a wheelchair has been an adjustment for both Troy and Tami. He used to work in a sawmill in Roseburg with an active job and an active lifestyle. Camping, fishing, family time. That’s all different now. Neither he nor Tami is able to work. He is still managing constant pain and spasms and she is his caregiver.

“For people who have been hurt like I have, things must be decided on a case-by-case basis,” he says. “It’s really unfair to take away a jury’s right to make a decision after hearing both sides of a story.”