Broken Men of the New Society

Darryl was a difficult patient I had been treating for several years. A stocky man in his forties, he shuffled into each appointment with a walking stick. At first sight, the stick gave him a distinguished quality, but then a trace of his bare belly showed beneath a T-shirt that never quite covered his bulging gut.

Every appointment would begin the same way.

“How are you travelling, Darryl?” I’d ask.

“Yeah, alright,” he’d mumble. “F— insurance pissing me off as usual.”

Darryl was being funded through worker’s compensation after suffering a crush injury to his lower back while lifting crates in a factory. He underwent several operations to insert plates and metal rods in his spine, to the point where scans of his spine resembled a construction site, but his pain and mobility showed few signs of improvement.

His employer had kept him on “light duties”, which was essentially a euphemism for doing the most basic paperwork, but the factory shut down after…