A woman whose life has been drastically and negatively altered since suffering a workplace accident has had her benefits reinstated by the Yukon Workers' Compensation Appeal Tribunal after they were cancelled by the compensation board.

The 50-year-old woman was working as a custodian at a local school when the injury occurred.

It was the evening of July 6, 2009, and the school was empty except for a number of students writing exams in another wing.

The woman said she was cleaning a mirror in one of the bathrooms when it came off its fastenings and shattered over her head.

A moment later, she heard someone in a nearby classroom, which she said surprised her because she thought she was alone.

It was a young student who was cleaning her classroom. The worker told the girl to be careful of the glass, then let the girl out of the school and locked the door behind her.

The last thing she remembers is walking into a second bathroom to see if there were any marks on her from the fallen mirror.

Meanwhile, her partner was waiting at home and starting to get worried.

He said his girlfriend always called him an hour before she was ready to get picked up because their car was not particularly reliable.

Normally, she would call by 6 p.m., but by 6:25 that evening, he still hadn't heard from her.

He knew something wasn't right, he told the tribunal members, so he went to the school. When he found all the doors locked, he began banging on the doors and knocking on all the windows with his keys, but no one responded.

After circling the school, he noticed a shadow at the last window.

When he peered in, he saw his partner coming toward the door with her janitor's cart.

She seemed disoriented, he said, and when she finally opened the door, he was shocked to see her cut and swollen face.

The woman didn't seem to notice she was hurt, and her boyfriend thought at first she had been beaten up. He went to the first bathroom and saw the shattered glass, then went to the second.

"There was blood all over the place,” he said.

He could make out the imprint of the woman's hair stamped into the blood on the ground, as if she had lain there for some time.

The woman was confused and more focused on putting away her cart and turning on the alarm than she was on her injuries, he said.

According to the emergency room report, the woman's front top and bottom teeth were smashed, the inside of her mouth was badly cut, her lip was split open, her nose was broken and she had serious bruising on her arms and chest.

She had no recollection of what happened, but after piecing together the timeline, the injuries and the evidence from the two bathrooms, it appears that shortly after being struck on the head by the mirror, she passed out and fell, striking her face on a sink and a toilet as she went down.

Her life has not been the same since.

At first, her doctor recommended 10 days off work. At the end of that period, however, the woman was still in considerable pain from her teeth, one of which had been completely knocked out, and several more were loose or broken. She was also suffering from headaches and was extremely emotional.

"She doesn't feel she can cope with going back to work,” her doctor noted, and recommended another week off.

After working two days, the woman saw a workers' compensation adjudicator on July 31. She was still suffering from headaches, and reported having fainting spells; she said she could not keep up the pace of work she had set before her injury.

The adjudicator called the woman's employer to see if she could work fewer hours and be given tasks that wouldn't require bending, lifting or twisting. The employer agreed, but it soon became clear that the woman's job as a janitor required all those things.

She continued working and seeing her doctor regularly through September, still complaining of headaches and sharp pains radiating out from her head and chest.

On Sept. 28, her boyfriend brought her to the emergency room again.

"She was watching TV and then she started looking behind her like there was something frightening on the wall,” the doctor's report states.

"She then became stiff. While (her boyfriend) was helping her to the bedroom, he states she slumped down, and seemed to be unconscious, foaming at the mouth, twisting, stiff and shaking for about 10 minutes.”

The following day, her family doctor said she was to stay off work until he could figure out what was happening.

Eleven days later, she was seen by a visiting neurologist, who gave the report which would end her injured-worker benefits.

Contrary to previous medical assessments, the neurologist said she did not have a concussion, and called the original head injury "minor”.

"I think that it is unlikely that a minor head injury would have triggered ongoing seizures,” he wrote.

"... I think it is quite possible (the worker) was destined to develop a seizure disorder.”

Although no previous or subsequent doctors' reports supported this assessment (another specialist said the injury and the seizures were "clearly” linked), the woman's WCB case manager cancelled her benefits in March 2010. The woman appealed that decision, but it was upheld by a hearing officer in August.

She was sent back to work, where she says her co-workers do not believe she is injured, and do not respect her limits on bending and lifting.

The woman has continued to have seizures and suffer from pain and intense anxiety.

"What most people do not understand is that it is a very stressful thing not to know if you are going to fall and hit your head,” her partner told the tribunal.

"(She) loves children and hates to have these things happen while at work. It puts her under a great deal of stress on its own,” he said.

"... She has changed a lot; she has no patience, no concentration, she cannot count. She feels as if she is being called a liar.”

The workers' advocate who spoke for the woman at the appeal tribunal said the compensation board sent the woman "to a job she was unfit to do.

"... She was put back into an unsafe environment that not only imperiled her own safety but also imperiled the safety of the school children and her co-workers

"She was put into a situation where she had another seizure, in addition to further seizures suffered at the school, where an ambulance needed to be called.”

The advocate further criticized the neurologist who said the woman was "destined” to have seizures, saying: "It is unscientific, it is speculative and it is guesswork and it detracts from what happened.”

The tribunal members agreed.

They said the report which prompted the end of the woman's benefits was confusing and lacked medical facts to back up its conclusions.

They said there was no evidence of a seizure condition before the night the mirror fell on her head, so the logical conclusion is that her current state is the result of a workplace injury.

The woman's benefits were reinstated and she will receive rehabilitation therapy, the tribunal ordered.