Nancy Edwards just wants to go home. Her doctors say it's OK, after almost two years of surgery and rehabilitation following the freak work accident that left her severely disabled. Her family and friends in Decatur are eager for her return.
But she's stuck in an extended-stay hotel near the Shepherd Center in Atlanta, where she continues therapy.
She lives near other people in similar situations. They remain in limbo as lawyers wrangle over the mandatory cost of making their homes handicapped-accessible, or finding them new homes that are.
"I just scream sometimes," said Edwards, 56, sitting in a wheelchair in the small suite that has been her home for a year and a half. "My family is in fragments. I feel like I'm not a wife to my husband. It's put a great strain on my relationship with my children."
The holdup in Edwards' case and others like hers is a state law that does not say how quickly employers must pay to either adapt injured employees' homes to their needs or provide them with new, suitably accessible homes.
Consequently, five catastrophically injured people, including Edwards, are waiting in the same hotel as the Georgia workers' comp process grinds slowly toward providing them with accessible homes.
Carol Olsen, a paraplegic who is Edwards' hotel neighbor, said she has been waiting to move into a new, accessible home for two years and a month.
"The law is so ambiguous, there's really no standard," said Olsen. "The difficulty is being in limbo."
It's an oversight that the state House Industrial Relations Committee considered at a legislative meeting last month, said Stan Watson (D-Decatur), the committee's vice chairman.
In general, there are two to five patients each year stuck in this housing limbo, according to the workers' compensation board, although it doesn't closely track how long patients stay in temporary quarters nor what their stays cost.
The board's executive director, Stan Carter, said those issues are between the injured employees and their employers, who pay the bills through insurance.
However, injured employees describe waits that stretch into years. Reasons for the delays vary according to the case, but all have one factor in common — there's no legally mandated sense of urgency that would compel employers to act.
Edwards said her employer, Emory University Hospital, pays about $50,000 a year to keep her in a suite divided into a small living area, bedroom, bath and kitchen. She has been there since March 2002.
Emory representatives say they want to resolve Edwards' housing dilemma and have offered her $250,000. But she refused the offer as inadequate for the extensive remodeling needed to make her Decatur cottage handicapped-accessible.
Edwards' neighbor at the hotel, Felix Houx, a former truck driver, said his situation is so absurd it's nearly comical. His original insurer went bankrupt, leaving Georgia's Insurers' Insolvency Pool to pay his tab.
So the pool has paid $90,000 to keep him, his wife and teenage son in the hotel while he and the insurer argued over the $120,000 cost of remodeling the basement and first floor of his Lawrenceville home.
Houx had been told he could move last month into a handicapped-accessible apartment for the interim.
But he said that the apartment had been rented to someone else because the landlord hadn't received a deposit from his insurer. This marks the fourth move date that has fallen through since July, Houx said.
His insurer refused comment.
Carter, head of the state compensation board, said his hands are tied in such cases. He said his staff can't intervene until the two sides reach an agreement.
Then, the board approves or denies the settlement with an eye toward a goal to "restore the employee as nearly as possible to his pre-injury situation," as its housing guidelines say.
"We're just regulators," Carter said, noting that his staff usually approves housing agreements within 10 days of receiving them.
"Really, we're more focused on making sure [patients] are receiving their weekly [salary] benefits and medical benefits," Carter said.
But patients and their families argue that employers are free to drag the housing process out for years, so that injured employees will settle for something, anything, just to go home.
"They say it's settled on a case-by-case basis, which means they just beat everybody down, one by one," said Steve Edwards, Nancy's husband.
The Edwardses are trying to decide whether to give up negotiating and turn to the courts system, starting with a workers' compensation administrative law judge. From there, either side can appeal to the full workers' compensation board, then move to Superior Court, on up to the Georgia Supreme Court.
— This condensed article has been reprinted from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.