You’ll Need VA Disability if You Have Osteomyelitis

If you were injured on or off the battlefield enough to get to your bones and then an infection developed in your bones after the rest of the wound healed, you’ve probably been diagnosed with osteomyelitis. The infection can cause redness, swelling, pain, and disabling symptoms. The VA recognizes that, so they have a rating schedule for veterans suffering from service-connected osteomyelitis. 

How The VA Rating for Osteomyelitis Works

Osteomyelitis is rare, but also very hard to completely cure. For that reason, the rating is based on episodes of infection within the last 5 years and the location of that infection. It can also be ‘cured’ via amputation, in which case you might get a better rating based on what was amputated rather than living with the infection. Ratings for the infection are also not permanent. Since more research is being done in curing chronic osteomyelitis and other deep infections of the bone, it will be reviewed every 5 years for an update. At that time, your rating may increase based on the number of episodes, fluid discharge, or constitutional symptoms. 

Symptoms or Location of Osteomyelitis	VA Disability Rating
Pelvis, vertebrae, major joints, or multiple locations with a long history of debilitation. Also considered are anemia, some liver diseases, and other constitutional symptoms	100% VA Rating
Frequent episodes with constitutional symptoms	60% VA Rating
Involucrum or sequestrum with or without discharging sinus (see below)	30% VA Rating
Discharging sinus or other signs of infection in the last 5 years	20% VA Rating
Inactive and clear with no evidence of infection for 5 years after repeated episodes.	10% VA Rating

Definitions of some of the terms used in the Osteomyelitis VA Ratings Schedule:

Constitutional symptoms:

Sometimes an infection can cause problems in your bowels, digestive tract, and internal organs. These problems would cause other symptoms like diarrhea, constipation, stomach cramps, difficulty breathing, painful urination, etc. Those are what the doctors call “Constitutional symptoms.”

Involucrum:

When new bone grows over the site of dead bones. If you have a section of bone that dies due to infection, new bone growth can grow over it. It can be a source of swelling, pain, redness, and other infection symptoms. 

Sequestrum:

When a piece of dead bone breaks off and is floating around in your body freely. This can cause pain, injury to nerves and blood vessels or veins, hurt tendons, and more. It can also harbor pus and infection and create a sore on your skin. 

Discharging Sinus:

This is a hole in your skin that puts out puss or blood. The sinus can be caused by a piece of dead bone preventing a wound from healing (sequestrum). If liquid is coming out of an infected wound, it is serious enough to see a doctor right away and it probably causes an increased VA rating for osteomyelitis. 

Prove Service-Connection for Osteomyelitis

Common causes of osteomyelitis are injuries to the bones or staph infections that started somewhere else in the body and then traveled to an area like the pelvis or the spine. Once the infection is in the pelvis or spine, it is very difficult to cure.

Newer treatments are being discovered that make it possible to treat in the ankle and foot areas. If you got shot and a bullet broke or nicked one of your bones, you might be a candidate for osteomyelitis. Any medical records that you have from your time in service are excellent evidence, but any follow-up appointments from civilian doctors can help too. Signs of infection like swelling, pain, redness all point to a possible case of osteomyelitis, even if that doctor didn’t diagnose it as such at the time. 

Osteomyelitis can affect your daily life and your employability

What the VA calls “Constitutional Symptoms” are the things that will get your rating up to the 60% or 100% range. Acute osteomyelitis can affect your bowels, cause extreme weight loss, give you repetitive headaches, or even excessive sweating. Sometimes the ‘cure’ for osteomyelitis is to amputate a finger or limb that is infected. The newest research advances are on foot and ankle infections because it is so debilitating to lose a foot or part of your leg.

If you have other symptoms due to your osteomyelitis, those can carry their own VA Rating. Sickle cell anemia can actually be brought on by the effects of osteomyelitis on the bones and bone marrow. If that happens, make sure you apply for a VA Rating for sickle cell trait also. As the symptoms build up you want to make sure they all appear on your VA disability application. Even a service-connection with a 0% rating is a start. From there you can apply for a rate increase as needed. 

Other VA Disabilities that Go With Osteomyelitis

Like I said, sickle cell anemia carries its own rating and is a common secondary-diagnosis from osteomyelitis. Depending on the location of your infection and how often it shows up, you might also get a finger, hand, or foot amputated. At that point, you should get disability for the loss of that limb. Your bone infection rating may drop at that point since they think they healed it. If it comes back, then you are up in that range of troops that are getting a combination of ratings for amputation and osteomyelitis. You might be getting into the TDIU range at that point, depending on your other ratings. 

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What is TDIU?

Total disability based on individual unemployability (TDIU) pays the same amount as a 100% rating for veterans who can’t hold down a steady job that supports them financially (known as substantially gainful employment) because of their service-connected disability. Odd jobs, which the VA calls “marginal employment,” don’t count.

Veterans are eligible for TDIU if they have:

• At least one service-connected disability rated at 60% or more disabling OR
• Two or more service-connected disabilities with at least one rated at 40% or more disabling and a combined rating of 70% or more

Use our VA disability calculator to estimate your
combined VA rating and monthly payment

Cellulitis might come as a part of osteomyelitis, but it is not a VA disability. The thing is, if you have recurrent cellulitis, it might be a sign of another condition. It can occur due to the infection and your struggling immune system, but it can also happen because of another blood-illness, or be completely unrelated and independent. Chronic fatigue and hemolytic anemia are also like that. They can be aggravated and look like symptoms of osteomyelitis, but they are also illnesses in their own right. As your body struggles to maintain its normal blood supply, these other illnesses can show up. 

Osteomyelitis Isn’t A Death Sentence, but Keep Fighting for Your Claim if You Die

There are many people, many of them veterans, that are living a stable life with osteomyelitis. Granted, some of the symptoms and infections in some body parts can shorten your lifespan, for the most part, it is treatable or at least maintainable. Since even today in 2019 doctors are still learning more about how bone infections work, you may have a spouse or family member that died from what you think was a bone infection. If your spouse died from osteomyelitis or another bone infection and he or she was a veteran, you should give us a call. We can review their medical records and see if the signs pointed to the VA doctors missing something. We can help you file a DIC claim for free and we’ll only charge you after we win your case. 

Newly discovered illnesses and misdiagnosed conditions from the past often fully qualify for a claim even years after the death of a veteran. If there was an illness that they didn’t understand until a couple years ago and there was something they could have done differently, they will pay for it. 

Why Osteomyelitis Messes You Up So Bad

Your bones are the factory for all of your blood. Bone marrow in the hollow space in the middle of all of your bones produces red blood cells that carry oxygen from the lungs to your cells. Since osteomyelitis is a bone infection, it brings an infection right into ground zero of your blood.  Your bone marrow then struggles to produce blood and get it around to all of the rest of your body that needs it. A section of infected bone can die inside your body and then new bone can grow around it. That is called involucrum. Even though you have new bone growth, the old dead bone underneath it can still cause problems. 

Reduced red blood cell production can weaken your entire body. You might need iron supplementation or you might not be able to be as active as you were once before. A reduction of exercise and activity can lead to other health problems like obesity, arthritis, and high cholesterol. Since the bone infection can quickly travel through your bloodstream, your infection can spread from its origin in your leg to your pelvis, then to your entire body. Osteomyelitis of the pelvis or a vertebral infection is particularly serious for this reason. The bigger the infection, the faster it can spread to other bones in your body. 

When Broken Bones Heal but Hurt More than They Should

Broken bones will always ache when the rain is coming or it gets cold. Those are normal aches and pains that travel with you for the rest of your life. A bone infection like osteomyelitis is more intense, but it shows up in the same spots. As a bone heals, the pieces need to grow back together in proper alignment. A malunion is what happens when a bone heals back together but isn’t lined upright. If you were out on the front lines and had an injury that didn’t get medical help for several days, your bones might have healed in this way. If a bullet or shrapnel carried some bacteria into that wound, there is more to heal than that broken bone. 

Any medical records of broken bones should be reviewed when you apply for VA benefits. A fever or soreness reported in the same area months later is more than aches and pains. Redness and swelling are tell-tale signs of an infection if you have any record of that. 

What Your C&P Exam for Osteomyelitis Will Be Like

You want to prepare and be on time for your C&P exam. It’s one of the most important moments of your entire multi-year VA disability application process. When you show up, they are going to ask you about a lot of your symptoms. Don’t downplay or blow off any symptoms. If you say, “My knees hurt, but I still get around alright,” and you spend one weekend a month bedridden and in pain, they’ll put in your report that you “still get around alright.” Here is a list of disability benefits questionnaires that include osteomyelitis.

The doctor is going to look for areas that ache and show signs of infection. He or she is going to mark on the chart with enough detail that the elbow and wrist are counted separately. Note specific fingers and toes as you tell them about your pain, swelling, redness, and circulation. Since bone infections can spread through the bloodstream, the doctor is going to try to diagnose how isolated your infection is. 

The doctor may send you to a specialist to treat some of the symptoms, but treatment isn’t the goal of a C&P exam. Don’t leave frustrated that they didn’t give you any advice on what to do about it. Their job is to report the degree and diagnosis of your service-related disabilities. If they find epidural abscesses or symptoms that point to spondylodiscitis (a specific kind of osteomyelitis) they may refer you for follow-up appointments. When you go to those follow-up appointments, they don’t count as your C&P exam, but any reports that come from those doctors should be used in your claim too. 

We’ll Stick With You As We Figure Out Your Disability Claim

You can tell that getting VA disability for osteomyelitis can be a complicated process, even if it doesn’t change or spread for the 5 years that you spend applying and appealing. We have been helping injured people get justice since the 80s and we aren’t going anywhere. Our redundant staff can help you sort out the paperwork, communicate with the VA, and make sure you get justice for your disabilities. Every case is different and the VA looks at each case individually, but you can see from 541 reviews on Google and 280 reviews on Facebook that Woods and Woods works hard for disabled veterans. Start your free consultation today by calling 1-866-232-5777.