The Wodonga resident desperately needed spinal surgery, but could not get the Transport Accident Commission to foot the bill.

After 14 months of getting nowhere with the TAC, he finally had the surgery through the public hospital system.

The pain is gone and he is now hunting for a job, although he is still waiting for the TAC to meet his “many thousands of dollars” of out-of-pocket expenses.

Mr Ryan’s TAC claim centred on a motorcycle accident he had at Orbost 19 years ago.

He came off his motorbike when he came around a bend and swerved to avoid a van, which had stopped on the road after a crash.

He didn’t appear to suffer any serious injuries, but in June last year he woke one morning in extreme pain.

At times it felt like his right arm was on fire.

The head of St Vincent’s Hospital surgical department later said in a letter to the TAC it was likely the pain was from damage done in his accident.

The C6 and C7 discs at the base of Mr Ryan’s neck were damaged, squeezing the nerve that runs down his arm.

In March this year, a commission spokesman said a clinic panel determining his case was “treating it as time critical”.

Three months later Mr Ryan received a request from the TAC for information from every doctor he had seen in the past 20 years, except for his own GP, who he saw immediately after the accident.

After that he received “very little” correspondence from the TAC.

“I’ve had one letter about two weeks ago saying they wanted to have an independent medical assessment done on me,” he said.

But the pain had been so bad he had asked his GP about three months ago to refer him to the neurosurgery department at St Vincent’s.

By then Mr Ryan had lost all feeling in his right hand and knew he needed surgery.

That would involve cleaning out fragments of bone in his neck and putting in an artificial disc to give space to his nerve.

The surgery occurred on October 8.

The TAC requested its assessment for December 9, a date Mr Ryan said he had already reported was not possible because of a post-surgery assessment.

“The surgery is absolutely life-changing,” he said.

“I’m applying for jobs at the moment and I’m no longer taking any pain medication at all.

“But it just confounds me that with the amount of song and dance there is about the public health system that you can work your way through it with a spinal injury faster than you can get a response out of a government-mandated insurance company.”

Mr Ryan said the TAC processing its claim would allow for a reimbursement to the health system.

He said that would promote someone else off the public elective surgery waiting list.

The TAC was happy to discuss the case in detail with The Border Mail in March, but not yesterday.

“For privacy reasons it’s not appropriate to discuss information relating to individual claims and circumstances,” a spokesman said.