“I might be injured, scarred, abused, degraded, humiliated, demeaned, patronised, disrespected and my dignity torn to shreds, but I’m stubborn and I’m driven for social justice, for accountability and integrity…”
Vicki Bourbous (from my emails)
By late July and August 2022, I was being asked a seemingly ordinary insurance question:
How was I progressing?
But there was nothing ordinary about the meaning of “progress” in my life by then.
I wasn’t simply “recovering” from a psychological injury while following a treatment plan and gradually returning to normal life. I was trying to recover while simultaneously navigating the very systems that should have been supporting that recovery. Ironically, those very systems were harming me.
One of the most revealing records from this period isn’t correspondence with my employer or the workers’ compensation insurer.
It’s my correspondence with TAL, the income protection insurer.
Because while I was fighting over workers’ compensation, return to work, regulatory responsibility and the consequences of everything that had happened, TAL was paying income protection.
It was, quite literally, helping me keep a roof over my head.
See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/04/two-insurers-one-injury-only-one-did.html regarding the background to the this.
——
26 July 2022 — “Someone is finally listening”
On 26 July 2022, I wrote to TAL after speaking with a supervisor at the Fair Work Ombudsman the previous day.
I had spent an hour explaining what had happened to that staff member of the FWO.
At that point, even being listened to felt significant.
I wrote:
“We spoke for an hour, which shows that someone is finally listening.”
I explained that the Fair Work Ombudsman and my (now second) workers’ compensation solicitor had received my extensive compilation of records.
Those records documented my repeated attempts to obtain:
“cooperation, collaboration and communication (and support and protection)”
I was trying to make people understand that the trauma wasn’t confined to the events that had originally brought me to this point.
In my contemporaneous account, I described that what happened after making the workers’ compensation claim, was an enormous source of additional trauma.
I wrote:
“The trauma I sustained, from the moment I made the claim and everyone had a legal obligation to comply and support my recovery in my job as per agreed injury management plan, is massive.”
But the email also contains something important that shouldn’t disappear beneath everything else.
I thanked TAL.
I specifically thanked TAL for:
“excellent service, compassion and support”
and for:
“keeping the roof over my head in this nightmare that took so long, because no one else had listened until now.”
That sentence says an extraordinary amount about where my life had reached.
Income protection was supposed to be a secondary financial safety net.
Yet, TAL had become the insurer financially supporting me while I was fighting to have the workers’ compensation system do what it should already have been doing.
——
Also on 26 July 2022 — TAL asks for a progress update
Later that same day, 26 July 2022, the TAL Claims Consultant wrote requesting an updated Progress Attending Doctor’s Statement and answers to four questions.
They were straightforward insurance questions:
- What were my ongoing symptoms?
- What was my treatment plan?
- How was the workers’ compensation process going?
- And what social, family or external factors were helping or hindering my recovery?
TAL requested the information by 20 August 2022, explaining that it was needed to assist with managing and planning ahead on my income protection claim.
The attached medical form asked my treating doctor about diagnosis, symptoms, treatment, complicating factors, work capacity, suitable duties, rehabilitation and a possible return-to-work plan.
This is the very thing that Catholic Church Insurance were responsible for, under a statutory scheme, in alignment with their injury management plan agreement with MYSELF, NTD, and EMPLOYER.
SEE http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/06/injury-management-plan-legally-binding.html
AND http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/08/enter-unsafework-nsw-that-rtw-plan-i.html
AND http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/09/injury-management-and-rehabilitation.html
On paper, it was a conventional progress assessment.
But answering it required me to explain something far more complicated:
What does “progress” mean when recovery itself has become entangled with systems, insurers, regulators, lawyers, medical assessments and repeated attempts to be heard?
——
20 August 2022 — My definition of “progress”
On 20 August 2022, I responded.
My opening words captured the disconnect immediately:
“The context for the word ‘progress’ is most likely different and exceptional to what TAL, as an ethical insurer, has come across.”
I then added:
“But I’m speeding up progress for many reasons, not just for this deadline to update TAL.”
This was where an insurance progress report became something much larger.
I identified symptoms of PTSD as the main debilitating factor and explained, in my own words at the time, that a significant part of my psychological injury had developed or intensified through what happened after I entered the workers’ compensation system.
I described my experiences involving ACU, Catholic Church Insurance, the NTEU, SafeWork NSW and SIRA NSW, together with the circular referrals between the Fair Work Ombudsman, police and the local court.
Whatever institution I approached, I seemed to encounter another boundary between jurisdictions.
Fair Work had previously directed me toward police.
Police regarded it as a “workplace matter” and suggested an APVO.
The local court, in turn, regarded it as a “workplace issue” and referred me back toward Fair Work.
I described the emotional result plainly:
“I’m frightened, creeped out and no matter how resilient you are, left to battle alone, the battle scars are real.”
That was my “progress report.”
——
Recovery required safety — not another administrative loop
I told TAL that my current “treatment plan” involved the Fair Work Ombudsman.
That might sound strange until the context is understood.
For me, recovery had become inseparable from restoring some belief that an institution with authority would finally listen, examine the evidence and act.
I wrote:
“Restoring my trust in a government regulator is part of my treatment plan, if anyone is respectful and ethical enough to give me a voice in my own recovery.”
That phrase — a voice in my own recovery — matters enormously.
I wasn’t saying that regulatory action could substitute for treatment. I was explaining that the circumstances perpetuating the injury hadn’t been resolved.
I was seeing a psychologist I was referred to for the secondary trauma caused by the system, and during a consultation on the Thursday before my 20 August email, I told him that it seemed nobody understood what PTSD did to my ability to function when confronted with triggers.
Those triggers included government portals, emails and telephone calls because, by then, I associated those processes with previous experiences of distress, distrust and institutional failure.
I had therefore sent further correspondence to the Fair Work Ombudsman explaining the symptoms of PTSD and what I needed in order to begin recovering.
One letter had been delivered on Friday, 12 August 2022.
Another was due to arrive at the Fair Work Ombudsman’s GPO box on Monday, 22 August 2022.
I was still trying.
Again.
——
23–24 August 2022 — Even my medical care was changing
At the same time, another significant change was occurring.
I explained to TAL that my long-term GP was cutting back his work and was due to begin approximately ten weeks of extended leave from Wednesday, 24 August 2022.
I had been his patient since I was approximately eight years old.
I wrote:
“I’ve never had to find a new GP...”
I had made an appointment with my new GP for Tuesday, 23 August 2022.
So while TAL needed a Progress Attending Doctor’s Statement, I was simultaneously facing a change in treating doctors after decades of continuity.
This is the reality that administrative forms rarely capture.
A box might ask:
What is the current treatment plan?
The human answer can be pages long.
——
“I was a soccer ball being kicked around”
When TAL asked how the workers’ compensation process was going, I described the fragmentation that had come to define my experience.
My description at the time was blunt:
“I was a soccer ball being kicked around in this fragmented and disjointed ‘system’.”
I continued:
“That must change, because the lack of cohesion is perfect for deceit and systemic abuse to fester and succeed.”
That fragmentation is one of the most important themes running through my records.
Every organisation can potentially point toward another organisation because something falls outside its precise jurisdiction.
But a human life doesn’t divide itself neatly into jurisdictions.
- Employment affects income.
- Income affects housing.
- Workplace safety affects health.
- Health affects capacity.
- Workers’ compensation affects treatment and rehabilitation.
- Regulatory responses affect trust.
And prolonged unresolved conflict affects everything.
The individual lives with the cumulative consequences.
——
The request that started everything
Amid everything I wrote to TAL, one sentence stripped the entire situation back to its beginning:
“The irony that the only request I had was a safe work environment. It’s disgusting.”
That remained the centre of it for me.
I had wanted safety.
I wanted to recover.
I wanted the support necessary to return to my substantive permanent HEW8 Senior Library Coordinator role.
I wrote that this was:
“always non-negotiable.”
Recovery at work! My statutory workplace right under a statutory scheme!
Rehabilitation and a safe return to my job IS recovery for me!
I wanted a voice in my human and employee right to recover in my job!
——
Who should have been paying?
My correspondence also records an uncomfortable financial contradiction.
TAL was paying income protection.
Yet the financial responsibility properly belonged within the workers’ compensation system.
I wrote:
“And CCI should be made to pay TAL the costs of saving my life with temporary income protection insurance. This was always CCI’s responsibility, not TAL’s.”
I wanted TAL reimbursed.
That’s important because my criticism wasn’t indiscriminate.
My records distinguish between organisations according to how I experienced their conduct.
At this point in 2022, I was expressly describing TAL as “an ethical insurer.”
I thanked its staff for compassion and support, and I recognised that its payments had helped keep me housed.
My anger was directed at what had caused TAL to carry a financial burden that should never have fallen upon it.
——
“I’ve had to battle alone”
When TAL asked about social factors affecting recovery, the answer became deeply personal.
I wrote:
“I’ve had to battle alone.”
Friends had supported me, but I felt ultimately alone in navigating what had happened.
My family had been affected, and I was exhausted.
But the same email also contains defiance.
I wrote:
“I might be injured, scarred, abused, degraded, humiliated, demeaned, patronised, disrespected and my dignity torn to shreds, but I’m stubborn and I’m driven for social justice, for accountability and integrity…”
That wasn’t the language of someone who had stopped caring about life or work.
It was the language of someone urgently trying to regain both.
I continued:
“Once my right to recover in my work with support happens… I can enjoy life again.”
And then came the question I had been asking in different forms for years:
“I have a right to a voice in my own recovery. When is someone going to listen?”
——
David and Goliath
By August 2022, even my family worried about what it meant to challenge institutions with far greater resources and power.
My response about taking on “Goliath”:
“Why do people leave out the ending of that story?”
I reminded them that David defeated Goliath.
Whatever anyone thinks about the metaphor, it captured how I viewed all this.
I didn’t have institutional power.
I didn’t have endless money.*
I didn’t have teams of lawyers, executives, claims “specialists”, HR “professionals” or government officers behind me.
What I had were records.
Dates.
Emails.
Documents.
Datasets.
My professional skills as an information manager and researcher.
My memory of what had happened. Documented.
And my refusal to surrender my own account of my life.
* And public money is our tax contribution anyway, so we have a right to know and ensure it’s used in an ethical and socially responsible manner.
——
“The truth is coming out”
I finished my 20 August 2022 email by explaining that I’d had enough.
The timing was almost symbolic.
I was changing doctors.
I was corresponding again with the Fair Work Ombudsman.
I was trying to explain PTSD to institutions whose processes were the cause and ongoing triggers.
I was trying to progress workers’ compensation statutory obligations.
And I was still dependent upon income protection to maintain financial security.
I closed with:
“The truth is coming out and they can’t ignore it anymore.”
Looking back at these records, what strikes me is how much work an injured person was doing simply to assert their right to recover.
- Writing.
- Documenting.
- Explaining.
- Following up.
- Finding another doctor.
- Seeing a psychologist specialising in trauma caused by systemic harm.
- Talking to lawyers.
- Approaching regulators.
- Completing insurance requirements.
- Trying to preserve income.
- Trying to protect family.
- Trying to return to work.
- Trying to make someone understand.
And still being asked:
How is your progress?
Perhaps that’s the deeper question these records raise.
When a person is psychologically injured, we tend to measure “progress” through symptoms, treatment appointments and work capacity.
But what happens when the environment surrounding that person continues to feel unsafe?
What happens when accessing the systems intended to help becomes part of the distress?
What happens when an injured worker spends more energy navigating fragmented institutions than actually recovering?
And what does recovery mean when the person keeps saying what they need, but feels nobody with sufficient authority is listening?
In August 2022, I had already answered that question for myself:
“I have a right to a voice in my own recovery.”
Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 439, 443-444, 466-467.
