For three months, Mike VanPatten worked in pain.

His supervisor and crew didn't want to log a lost-time accident, he said. So they harassed and intimidated him, in what he considered an attempt to push him into quitting.

It started after VanPatten got banged up pretty good in the derrick. Initially, he received treatment at St. John's Medical Center in Jackson. Days later, he was still in pain, but the drilling company's safety man insisted on taking him to a special doctor in Rock Springs to get a work release, according to VanPatten.

"They didn't give me a choice," VanPatten said. "They said, 'You're coming with us.' So I did exactly what they told me."

VanPatten said the doctor in Rock Springs supposed he had some cracked and bruised ribs, and told him to "work as directed."

Three months after his accident, VanPatten was still in extreme pain and having difficulty breathing. He finally persuaded a doctor to perform an MRI, suspecting there was more to his pain than just bruising.

"The tech guy rolled me out of (the) tube and said, 'Mr. VanPatten, let me help you. You have a broken back,"' said VanPatten, 47, who now lives in Evanston.

VanPatten had been a logger in Oregon in the early 1990s. He "blew" two discs in his back while pulling guideline wires. VanPatten said he struggled with Oregon's workers' compensation program over that injury.

After treatment and several years of healing, though, VanPatten was doing well. Ten years later, he easily passed two required physicals to get on as a rig hand in Wyoming.

"They made me go out and lift, climb, run on a treadmill, all that. I did two of those for the company, and I checked out both times. I was in fine shape," he said.

Yet Wyoming's workers' compensation program argued that VanPatten's back problems didn't result entirely from injury he sustained while on the job in Wyoming. The agency assigned him a permanent partial disability rating of 8 percent, which essentially would end his case with a $7,000 check.

VanPatten said he can't return to physical work. If he takes the $7,000 settlement, he'll be forced to rely on government welfare programs. That's not why employers pay good money into the workers' compensation program, he said.

"It's sad that Wyoming makes all this revenue from energy, because we're doing the most dangerous jobs out there," VanPatten said. "Then they turn their backs on us and our families when we get hurt."

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

One worker's story:

Mike VanPatten

The Star-Tribune is publishing the personal stories of several injured workers as part 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.