For some people, there's not much life outside of work. These folks are tailor-fit to their jobs, and time away from work is time outside of themselves.

That's exactly how Eric Yates of Casper felt during the six months he was off work healing from a rotator cuff injury.

"I was sitting in my trailer watching TV, getting bored and losing money," Yates said. "I told my doctor I couldn't wait. I went back to work two weeks early."

Yates, 38, is built like a sack of cement. His bald and tattooed head is menacing, but his aggression has always been dutifully applied to his biggest passion - oil field work. Just as a spider monkey is perfectly suited to its Brazilian rainforest, so was Yates in the rig's maw of crashing metal and hydraulics.

"Work is my passion," he said. "Work is my life. I'm not a social person."

In 2005, Yates went back to work on a rig outside Shoshoni. Then one day a set of elevators came crashing down on his right foot with 280,000 tons, splitting his toes in opposite directions.

Yates' shoulder surgery hadn't turned out well. With the addition of his foot injury, he was too battered to return to laborious work. The combination of his injuries means returning to physical labor is next to impossible.

Now, for the first time in his life, Yates is no longer able to take care of himself. Gritting through chronic pain, the loss of physical stamina and the loss of his livelihood, Yates sometimes falls apart.

He has attempted suicide more than once. Twice he has ended up at the Wyoming Behavioral Institute.

Wyoming's workers' compensation program gave Yates a modest 11 percent permanent partial impairment rating, and gave him a $9,000 settlement to end the case. He might win a permanent total disability benefit of $10,000.

Yates said that's a pittance compared with what he would have earned in an oil field career. If he had continued working in the oil field at $28 per hour, 40 hours per week, until he retired, he could have earned $1.68 million.

Workers' compensation offers vocational training, or retraining for workers who are unable to return to the highly physical jobs they once had. But Yates, with a fifth-grade education, doesn't see much use in it.

Retraining this lifelong roughneck for an office setting is like finding a proper place for a rusty tire iron on a formal dining table. And if you ask him, the prospect of finding any non-manual-labor position in the oil field business is less than zero.

"I'm blackballed," he said. "Because of this workers' compensation case, I will never work for another oil field company or contractor again in my life."

Reporter Dustin Bleizeffer can be reached at (307) 577-6069 or dustin.bleizeffer@trib.com.

One worker's story:

Eric Yates

The personal stories of injured workers are a key element of this special report on workers' compensation. These stories are unavoidably one-sided, because Wyoming's Workers' Safety and Compensation Division is legally barred from discussing individual cases.

To provide a balanced discussion of the overall issue, the Star-Tribune has sought out additional perspectives from all sides, including employers, legislators and state officials.