7 months out, still in daily pain, and I feel like no one believes me anymore

Oh my gosh, yes. The invisible part — that hit me hard. After my accident I kept getting "but you look fine!" from literally everyone, including my own mom. Meanwhile I was white-knuckling it through eight-hour shifts on about four hours of sleep because the pain kept waking me up. You are not imagining it. The disconnect between how you look and how you actually feel after a spinal injury is so real and so isolating.

Compression fractures do NOT heal on a neat little timeline, and returning to a physically demanding job that early with that kind of injury is genuinely hard on your body. The fatigue you're describing isn't weakness — it's your nervous system working overtime just to get you through the day. Please be really honest with your doctor about your pain levels and what your job actually requires physically. A lot of patients downplay it in the office and then the doctor has no idea what you're actually going through.

The fact that your doctor's demeanor changed once he knew you had an attorney is a red flag worth paying attention to. Some physicians get weird about it because they don't want to get dragged into litigation. Document EVERYTHING yourself — a pain journal, photos on bad days, notes after every appointment. Don't rely on anyone else to build your record for you.

On the attorney communication thing — you are absolutely allowed to call or email and ask for a status update. A good PI firm will have a case manager or paralegal who can at least walk you through where things stand. If you've been waiting weeks between any contact, send a written message (email is great because it's documented) and ask specifically: where are we in the process, what do you still need from me, and what's the timeline looking like? That's not being difficult, that's being your own advocate.

Not legal advice, but — the delayed imaging review situation you described can actually be really important to your case. The gap between the accident, the scan, and when treatment actually reflected the real diagnosis is something an experienced PI attorney should be building into the narrative of your claim. If yours hasn't asked you detailed questions about that timeline, bring it up yourself. You shouldn't have to, but sometimes you do.

I just want to say — the fact that you're showing up every day while dealing with all of this is genuinely impressive, but please don't let "impressive" become your new normal if your body is telling you something is wrong. Pushing through a broken back is not the same as pushing through a bad week. You matter more than your attendance record. 💙

I used to work on the claims side and I'll tell you — gaps in treatment and returning to work early can sometimes get framed by adjusters as evidence that you're "not that hurt." I'm not saying that to scare you, just to say: keep going to your appointments even on days you feel slightly better, and make sure every bad day at work is in some kind of written record somewhere. Don't give them anything easy to misinterpret.

Genuine question — has your attorney actually seen the full radiology report, or just the summary your doctor gave? Because sometimes the clinical notes and the actual imaging findings say different things, and if your attorney is basing his read of the case on a one-paragraph doctor summary, he might genuinely not understand how serious the injury is. Worth asking directly.