Tangle takes 11 years, $400,000 to fix

Timaru man Trevor Norton's brush with ACC bureaucracy has, he says, cost him 11 years of his life, cost ACC about $400,000 and was solved with a $1500 operation.

After what he describes as a long and frustrating battle, Mr Norton said he is not surprised the corporation has run low on funds, but said it would be a mistake for it to axe crucial funding for physiotherapy.

He lost the use of his right hand in 1998, while working in the meat industry.

While Mr Norton had an operation for trigger finger, it didn't fix the problem.

"I lost a lot of use in my right hand and had to become left-handed."

It was in December last year when he got an operation for carpal tunnel syndrome. Within 14 days he was back at work and, for the first time in years, he had no pain in his hand.

For three years, in what seemed to be a circle, he went to see specialists, ending up with a file hundreds of pages thick. Not able to use his right hand, he told ACC the problem must be carpal tunnel syndrome, but this "fell on deaf ears".

While several medical specialists said there had been "possible misadventure" in Mr Norton's operation for trigger finger and that they found the problem "looks like carpal tunnel", he said, but it wasn't enough for ACC. He said according to the company the mitigating factor was it "only says 'a possibility"'.

In the third year that he was on ACC a change in rules meant that if a person could work, then they no longer qualified for ACC. He estimates in those three years of seeing specialists, ACC probably spent about $400,000 on him.

Because he could still work with his left hand, Mr Norton set out to try to make the most of a bad situation, working in jobs that he could do, resigned to the fact there would be no solution to the problem.

"I thought I just had to live with it for the rest of my life, because you don't want to be a burden."

It was only last year when a light appeared at the end of the tunnel.

Resting from a hockey injury to his foot in February 2008, Mr Norton developed deep vein thrombosis, blood clots in his leg.

A specialist he saw about his leg said he could possibly fix his sore hand and after tests, Mr Norton was told he had carpal tunnel syndrome. But because of a negative test result he had when his hand had first become sore, he said ACC turned him down.

It was when he was declined again that Mr Norton said he went to ACC and begged his case manager and another manager to get him the surgery.

To his relief, Mr Norton said, they agreed.

ACC was unable to comment yesterday.

- © Fairfax NZ News