You're in an auto crash and now your shoulder hurts, particularly your left shoulder, and it's going up into your neck. You're not quite sure what's going on, and you're looking for some answers.
My name's Loyd Bourgeois, I am a Louisiana personal injury lawyer with offices in Luling and Metairie, Louisiana, and we see cases just like this all the time.
A typical and common injury that we see in auto crashes, especially on the left side, is a rotator cuff tear. The mechanism is typically you're pinned back as a result of your seatbelt, your body comes forward, this one is pushed back, this one comes forward, and it causes some amount of tearing in your rotator cuff. Your rotator cuff's the muscle around your shoulder here that kind of helps your arm move, right? Move forward, backwards, up and down. And so it can be injured as a result of that crash. I think in the past three years, out of our auto crash cases, a large percentage of them involve rotator cuff injuries.
Rotator cuff injuries can be also difficult to diagnose right away too, because typically you're looking at your neck and your spine, and that's where it causes a lot of pain, is up here. And they treat this, but they don't always look in that shoulder region. It's a very painful injury.
Many times it require surgical intervention, depending on how it's torn. The recovery from a rotator cuff injury surgery can be very painful, and it can be very long.
What I want to talk to you today, though, about are three things that can impact your ability to recover full financial justice as a result of your rotator cuff injury.
If you've been in a crash in the New Orleans Metro Area, Luling, St. Charles Parish, Houma-Thibodaux area, and you're feeling like you may have a rotator-cuff-type injury, you're feeling some pain in your neck and shoulder that's not going away, you haven't sought any counsel yet, please, reach out to us. We can evaluate what happened, what's going on medically, and give you a free case evaluation to see if it's something that we may be able to help you with.