I sprained my ankle years ago, but the doctor did not treat me properly. I still have pain, can I still sue?

I sprained my ankle years ago, but the doctor did not treat me properly. I still have pain, can I still sue?

Jul 06

As I was stepping off a public bus, my ankle rolled off the edge of uneven concrete. My body weight coming down on that ankle made the sprain even worse. I heard pop pop and then severe pain and I knew I did something very bad. I was taken to the emergency room and when I finally got to be seen by a doctor she was very short with me, rude, impatient and not very informative at all. I had a temporary splint that was put on from the ambulance driver which she basically YANKED off. She never examined my ankle. She just told me the x-ray showed I didn’t break my ankle and I can just go home. I tried to get any kind of a explanation from her but she just kept acting like she just wanted to get rid of me. I asked for crutches but she treated me like I was crying over a small scrape. She made me get off the examination table, with no assistance from anyone, and try to stand on it, which I couldn’t because of the pain and I couldn’t straighted my foot out. So she finally begrudgingly let me have the crutches, I went home and waited for my ankle to heal. 2 weeks later my sister convinced me to go to a small family practice nearby. Upon removing the bandage the doctor and his nurse were both shocked at how swollen, bruised and slightly crooked my ankle still was. The doctor was actually shocked that I got that kind of treatment from someone at the other hospital. He suggested a free hospital since I lost both my part time and full time jobs because of the injury and didn’t have any insurance. When I got there I was examined by doctors who were very caring and empathetic to me. They said I should have never been trying to walk on it, and told me about R.I.C.E. (Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation) I was never told that from the other ER doctor. I was told I suffered a 3rd degree sprain with possible ligament, tendon damage and a small broken bone. It took months of recovery with compression bandages, casts, constant pain and my ankle is not as flexible as it used to be. These days it’s difficult for me to stand on my ankle for longer than 2 hours. I wind up limping around all day afterwords with a constant dull achy pain radiating from inside the ankle outward. Is it still possible years later to sue that hospital because I feel like I was being denied proper medical treatment which may have also cause further damage to my ankle since it was swollen for 2 additional weeks?
Thanks for the advice all. To answer a couple of you, the 1st ER doc just told me it was a mild sprain and never explained how to take care of it. I really couldn’t do anything on my ankle anyway so I stayed off of it. She never even looked at it and if she did she would have seen it was the size of a large apple and already turning colors.

no, unless you can gather copies of all the reports and records from the time its going to be difficult to prove anything.

The er doctor can and simply will say that at the time she saw you there was no evidence of further or extreme injury. And that you must have either injured it further after the fact or failed to follow the recommendation to follow up with your own doctor if there was no progress within a set amount of time. Thats standard for most ER release directions.

If you had wanted to sue you should have pursued it at the time and when the latter doctors said there had been an issue in your treatment.