A serious injury may profoundly affect your life for months or years. A catastrophic injury may affect you for the rest of your life.

In Ontario, an injury is classified as catastrophic if it permanently impairs your ability to go back to your life as it was before the accident, in terms of your physical or mental abilities.

A catastrophic injury will require extensive medical and rehabilitative care. Even after working with doctors and rehab professionals, you may be unable to go back to work, or to work the way you did before your accident. You may also be unable to care for your family or participate in the activities you did before. You may even need help doing simple things like getting dressed, eating and getting around.

Our lawyers often have to fight for adequate compensation in catastrophic injury cases, as the expenses and losses can quickly become incredibly high.

Determining Catastrophe

The kinds of injuries that are considered catastrophic are flexible, and include:

• Paralysis, either partial or total
• Amputation or loss of function in a limb
• Blindness
• Brain injury
• Debilitating psychiatric conditions that prevent normal function
• A combination of conditions that result in at least 55 percent impairment of your functioning
• An injury may take some time to be recognized as catastrophic, as many people are fairly hopeful right after an accident and may expect to recover completely, with enough time and effort. Particularly for brain injury, spinal injury or psychological injury, it may take a long time to realize that you may not be able to go back to your pre-accident life.