Roughly 1 in 5 workers’ compensation claims filed in the United States is initially denied, according to data compiled by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs — a statistic that feels abstract until you’re standing in a grocery store checkout line next to someone living it.
That’s where I met Wanda Whitfield, 48, on a Tuesday afternoon in late February 2026. She was in the express lane at a Homeland store off Northwest Expressway in Oklahoma City, carefully scanning unit prices on a shelf of canned soup. We struck up a conversation — I mentioned I write about personal finance, she laughed the way people laugh when something hits a nerve — and twenty minutes later we were sitting in her car in the parking lot, talking about everything that had gone wrong in the last eighteen months.
Wanda works as a legal secretary at a mid-size civil litigation firm in downtown Oklahoma City. She’s been doing it for eleven years. Her annual salary sits at approximately $72,000, which puts her firmly in the upper-middle income bracket for her metro area. She pays $820 a month in child support for her two children, ages 14 and 11, following her divorce in 2021. She lives alone in a two-bedroom apartment in Edmond. On paper, she was managing.
The Injury That Started Everything
On September 11, 2024, Wanda slipped on a wet floor near the kitchen area of her office building. A cleaning crew had mopped the hallway and failed to leave a caution sign. She went down hard, catching herself with her left arm and twisting her lower back on the way down. A coworker helped her to her desk. By the next morning, she couldn’t stand upright without pain shooting down her left leg.
She filed a workers’ compensation claim with her employer’s insurance carrier the following week. What followed, she told me, felt like being slowly talked out of her own reality.
In November 2024, the claim was denied. The insurer cited a “pre-existing degenerative condition” in Wanda’s lumbar spine — a finding pulled from a 2019 MRI that had been ordered after that furniture-moving incident. The denial letter, which Wanda showed me a photo of on her phone, stated that her current injury could not be causally linked to the workplace fall with sufficient certainty.
Wanda, who works with attorneys daily, understood the language. She also understood that fighting it would cost her time and money she wasn’t sure she had.
The Medical Bills Her Insurance Didn’t Cover
With the workers’ comp claim denied, Wanda’s treatment costs rolled back onto her personal health insurance — a plan through her employer with a $1,500 deductible and 20% coinsurance after that. Between September 2024 and January 2025, she accrued approximately $8,400 in out-of-pocket medical expenses. That included two specialist visits, a new MRI, six weeks of physical therapy, and prescription anti-inflammatories.
She did not miss a single day of work. She told me this without pride, more like a person reciting a fact they’re still processing.
Oklahoma’s workers’ compensation system allows employees to appeal a denial, and Wanda did consult with an attorney at her firm — informally, over lunch. She was told she had a viable case but that the process could take anywhere from eight months to two years, and that attorney fees in contested comp cases typically run 20–25% of any awarded benefits. She decided to appeal, filing the necessary paperwork with the Oklahoma Workers’ Compensation Commission in December 2024. As of our conversation in February 2026, the case remains open.
When the Car Broke Down, the Floor Gave Way
The second blow came in January 2025. Wanda drives a 2016 Honda CR-V — paid off, reliable for years. On a Thursday morning commute, the transmission began slipping. By Friday, it was effectively undriveable. The repair estimate from two separate shops came back at $3,100 to $3,400.
She didn’t have it. After the medical bills, her emergency fund — which she’d carefully built to around $6,000 — was down to roughly $1,800. She wasn’t willing to wipe it out entirely.
For six weeks, Wanda carpooled with a coworker and used a combination of rideshares and borrowed time. She eventually put $2,200 toward the repair on a credit card — her first carried balance in three years — and pulled $900 from savings to cover the rest. The car was fixed in late February 2025.
Side Hustles and the Restless Math of Getting Ahead
Wanda is not someone who sits with a problem quietly. She told me she had been running side hustles since her divorce — not because she was desperate then, but because she’s wired that way. By the time her car broke down, she was already DoorDashing on weekend evenings and selling handmade jewelry through an Etsy shop she started in 2022.
In 2024, her side income totaled approximately $6,200 — about $4,100 from DoorDash and $2,100 from Etsy. She was proud of it. Then came tax season.
According to the IRS self-employment tax center, gig workers earning more than $400 in net self-employment income owe both the employee and employer portions of Social Security and Medicare taxes — a combined 15.3% on net earnings. For Wanda, that was a number nobody had warned her about.
Where Wanda Stands Now
When I spoke with Wanda in February 2026, she described her financial situation as “stable but tight.” Her workers’ comp appeal is still pending — she checks the Commission’s online case portal every few weeks. Her credit card balance from the car repair is down to about $600. Her savings are back up to approximately $3,200.
She’s still DoorDashing, but she’s now setting aside 25% of every side income payment in a separate account for taxes. She found a free tax preparation clinic through the Oklahoma Society of CPAs that helped her understand the mileage deduction she’d missed. For 2025, she plans to track every mile.
She’s also started looking into whether her ongoing back treatment qualifies for any deduction under the medical expense provisions of the federal tax code — specifically the threshold that allows deductions for expenses exceeding 7.5% of adjusted gross income, as outlined by the IRS Topic 502 guidance on medical expenses. At $72,000 gross, that threshold is $5,400. Her documented out-of-pocket costs may clear it.
Wanda ended our parking lot conversation the same way she started it — pragmatic, a little wry, already thinking about what to try next. She mentioned she’d been researching virtual paralegal work she could do on evenings, something that would pay better per hour than food delivery and wouldn’t put more miles on the CR-V. The restlessness that defined her before the fall of 2024 is still there. It’s just carrying more weight now.
Walking back to my own car, I thought about that statistic again — one in five workers’ comp claims denied. Behind every percentage point is a parking lot conversation, a stack of medical bills, a savings account quietly draining. Wanda’s story isn’t exceptional. That might be the most important thing about it.
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