His medical notes from that year are a confusing list of operations. Together, we tally them, and figure it’s 15 or 16. They were mostly to clean up a series of infections in his flap and to remove fluid, debris and even gas from his face. The worst, he says, was when they pushed steel surgical tools up his nostrils. “I came out of that, and oh f..., I was screaming for morphine. The pain was knocking me out.”

His doctor, David Vokes, decided after this Peter was “no longer a good candidate” for craniotherapy. He didn’t mind: “I didn’t want them to have another go.”

Later, he wished they’d adopted a less invasive approach, retaining the original flap, then fitting screws into the bone around it so Peter could attach a prosthetic part, and a $12,000 glass eye, over the top.

Peter had weeks-long stays in hospital, in between helping nurse an old friend dying of cancer, or staying with his parents at their home in a neat, well-tended retirement village for Dutch emigres in Henderson, west Auckland.

The small office by the front door became the heartbeat of a campaign for Peter to get proper recompense. It’s where Theo Kroon keeps the reinforced cardboard box which holds Peter’s file. It weighs 11.1 kilograms.

Peter’s father Theo Kroon has fought tirelessly for his son. Peter’s father Theo Kroon has fought tirelessly for his son.

It’s a tiring read, page after page of petty bureaucracy and medical jargon. But what’s most noticeable when reading it - once you get past that staggering 171 day delay, and the grinding paper fight with ACC - is Theo’s quiet heroism.

He’s now 81 years old. He’s wound down his successful embroidery business (the Hell’s Angels are among his former clients), but still plays in a country music band and chairs the village residents’ committee. And writes letters.

Peter isn’t keen on computers, so it’s Theo who has doggedly pursued Peter’s case, exchanging long correspondence with ACC, then when he exhausted that avenue, with local MPs, the Prime Minister, the Health and Disability Commission, and now with the Human Rights Commissioner.

“You try to help your son… but there’s not a hell of a lot you appear to be able to do,” he says, frustrated. “If your family is in trouble, you try to help. You fight and you try to do whatever it takes to get them a better deal - because the deal he got was no good.”

And of course, for much of this time, Peter was living with his parents. “It hasn’t been the easiest [time],” says Theo. “It has been stressful; very stressful for my wife to see him like that. You try to work out what way to go.”

Carefully, sometimes checking wording with his sister in Holland because he’s conscious that English is his second language, Theo kept writing, and writing.

“Without him, I wouldn’t have got a cent,” Peter says. “I wouldn’t have got anywhere.”

The paperwork had begun without Peter even knowing, as he lay in his hospital bed and the Accident Compensation Corporation began to slowly ponder whether he was entitled to compensation - and how much.

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It’s important to note that Peter wasn’t covered by ACC for his cancer. Had he suffered the cancer, been treated properly, and lived or died, he was entitled to nothing.

It was Waitemata’s incompetence which allowed him to claim for a ‘treatment injury’: an injury sustained as the result of medical failure.

ACC first commissioned two doctors to assess what impact the delay had on Peter. Ian St John decided it was impossible to say that earlier treatment would have meant a different outcome: “A speedier response … may not have … significantly reduced the progression of the client’s present condition.”

Peter Dady’s much longer assessment said: “It is clear that the disease progression during the 170-day delay has resulted in a very considerable worsening in Mr Kroon’s prognosis.” ACC went with Dady’s view.

Then they had to decide when the injury officially happened, for the purpose of calculating Peter’s payments - compensation is based on your previous 12 months’ earnings. Peter’s tax records show his income plummeted in the two years before diagnosis, partly due to the cancer’s growth and his ill-health, partly due to his prior depression. The earlier the date, the better for him.

It fell to clinical advisor Warren Maguire to make the decision. On January 14, 2014, Maguire said he would make a decision by March 29. On March 3, he asked for an extension - to August 26. Theo wrote back asking if ACC was just waiting for Peter to die. ACC say medical failure claims “require extensive and careful investigation”. They were mindful Peter was waiting, but Maguire needed time to seek expert opinions, and by law, was allowed up to nine months to decide.

On April 29, Maguire decided that the date of injury was August 9, 2013 - the date he said Tagelagi made his second, urgent referral. Theo disagreed. He reckons by May 23, Waitemata had already slipped below their own standards for dealing with Peter’s cancer, so that was when the treatment injury happened.

Much of the weight of Peter’s 11kg case file is protracted correspondence with ACC arguing over compensation. Much of the weight of Peter’s 11kg case file is protracted correspondence with ACC arguing over compensation.

ACC’s rules, however, say the date is taken from when the patient first seeks treatment for the injury. Eventually, after several appeals and lots of paperwork over many months, they settled on July 10, being the date Peter phoned Tagelagi to complain nothing was happening.

Peter earned just $29,165 in the year to March 2013 - below minimum wage (in the year to March 2012, he’d earned $53,978; he says in better years, he was taking home $80,000). So he was entitled only to ACC’s minimum weekly compensation: $440 before tax. Pitiful, he says.

ACC now say they actually used two years of Peter’s earnings to assess his compensation, not just one - but it didn’t increase his payout.

Part two was deciding the amount of Peter’s lump sum payment for his disability.

Assessing just how badly broken someone’s body is is a cold, mathematical process. Assessors use American Medical Association guidelines to work out the percentage loss of function of a body part, then total it all into a ‘total body impairment’.

Specialist ACC lawyer John Miller says these guidelines are tough, and quite badly injured people are often left with as little as $10,000.

Dr Ross McCormick’s thorough report encompasses Peter’s lost eye and socket, nerve damage, reduced jaw movement, wrecked right nostril and “markedly reduced life expectancy”, his 11kg weight loss, his inability to chew on one side, his poor balance (which stopped his roofing work) and perpetual fatigue.

“He is more likely than not to die within five years because his skin cancer is almost certainly not cured,” wrote McCormick. Peter had a total impairment of 88 per cent.

If the operation had been timely, McCormick said Peter’s disability would have been rated just eight per cent. So Peter’s overall impairment as a result of mistakes in his treatment was 80 per cent, McCormick found. This was crucial, because claims for 80% and above were entitled to the maximum payout. At the time, that was $131,765.

Peter was deep in debt when the cancer struck. He thought it was love, he says, but a failed relationship had cleaned him out. So he says he signed without being told he could get external legal advice. “I just had a massive sense of relief. I was out of debt. That was my thinking. I didn’t have a choice - I accepted it.” ACC says the lump sum was “an entitlement, not an offer”, therefore not up for negotiation.

The 2002 Injury Prevention and Rehabilitation Act reintroduced the payment of lump sums. At the time, Labour’s Michael Cullen said it would be limited to $100,000 over a lifetime. Gerry Brownlee, then National’s ACC spokesman, asked: “What about a paraplegic who had received the full $100,000 and had got back to work and re-established a life? If you then lost your sight, suddenly there would be no compensation.”

That maximum has gradually crept up. But the rule you can only claim once remains. If Peter walked under a bus tomorrow and lost both legs, it would be tough luck. Or, as actually happened, he had major complications and another 16 surgeries, well, tough luck too.

Despite this, in August 2015, ACC accepted a new treatment injury claim for the failure of Peter’s free flap.

After initially declining, they also agreed to assess him again. This time, Dr McCormick increased his impairment score to 82 per cent, predicting his eventual confinement to home (if he had one). But he was denied a second lump sum.

Miller says it’s a “rigid” system with little wriggle room. He might be able to find some around the date of Peter’s treatment injury (that’s the majority of the work his firm undertakes), perhaps argue it was a gradual condition caused by his job. But often, he says, people “spend a lot of time arguing it. And it is a pyrrhic victory, because it doesn’t advance things for them.”

In Peter’s case, while he wasn’t working at full strength for some time, that was down to the cancer, not the failure to treat the cancer.

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It’s what Miller calls the “ludicrous dichotomy” of the ACC system. Disease and illness aren’t recognised: someone confined to a wheelchair through multiple sclerosis gets nothing, someone in a wheelchair after being hit by a bus will get 80 per cent of their earnings and a lump sum. “There’s a big distinction between injury by disease, and injury by accident.”

It’s something that’s been on the mind of legislators for two decades, but without any changes being made.

Miller has more bad news. In the US, Australia or the UK, Peter could sue for personal injury. Here, he can only sue for punitive or exemplary damages. That means proving doctors either intended to harm him, or that they were not just negligent, but grossly negligent. “Negligence you fall off your chair at,” explains Miller. “In the surgeon’s case, you’d need him swigging a bottle of whisky in the operating theatre and cutting off the wrong leg.”

Legal fees might be $20,000, and your compensation? Maybe $20,000. Peter’s case? Miller considers it. “It’s just negligence,” he says. “Everything is stacked against this guy.”

ACC lawyer John Miller. ACC lawyer John Miller.

Through the series of appeals, and conciliation hearings and angry letters, Peter and Theo simply would not accept this was the system.

The transcript of one appeal hearing shows Theo and Peter getting increasingly upset, Peter cursing, and Theo declaring: “Rules are made to be broken”. No, says the reviewer, they’re not: “I hear your frustration, I can’t do anything about it and we as an organisation can’t do anything about it …”

Slowly, Theo exhausted all avenues. He wrote to the-then ACC minister Michael Woodhouse, then associate ACC minister Jacqui Dean, then to prime minister Bill English; he got a supporting email from his MP, Phil Twyford. This too was a dead end: Dean said it was an operational issue, ACC was acting within the law, and there was no discretion for ministers to make exceptions. There was nowhere further to go.

“ACC have got all the money and they don’t want to pay,” says Theo. “I think the system stinks. I think ACC is absolutely broken, they don’t really want to pay the money they are supposed to.”

ACC minister Iain Lees-Galloway. ACC minister Iain Lees-Galloway.

The present ACC minister, Iain Lees-Galloway, does not have good news for the Kroons. He said no changes were planned to either the lump sum, or the way weekly allowances are calculated. He said the allowance was fair because it reflected people’s earnings at the time, and also the ACC levies they were paying - a lower levy reflected a lower payout. The lump sum was designed to give “more flexibility to manage funds” than a regular allowance, but there was no plan to increase it.

“You try and stay alive, really, while dealing with a system, which for the most part, seems to be against you,” says Peter. “By comparison to other countries … [I’ve not had a great deal].

“The one thing I want changed is [the lump sum maximum] to go up, and the bullshit about ‘should further injury happen you are not entitled’. That’s criminal. It’s ruthless. They [ACC] know it is wrong; they’ve told me it is wrong.”

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