A working piano player's week in this town is stacked. Five nights on the bench, a Sunday brunch, two afternoons of teaching, and whatever session work turns up on short notice. All of it rests on a set of hands, a voice, a working ear, and the ability to sit upright for three hours at a stretch.
Which is why an injury lands differently on a performer than on someone with a desk. A fractured wrist from a collision on the drive home is not a six week inconvenience, it is a canceled quarter. A singer with a seat belt bruise across the sternum cannot support a phrase and cannot explain that to anyone who has not tried it. A drummer with a herniated disc loses the pedal foot before the hands ever come into it. Nobody on a bandstand gets a light duty assignment while the swelling goes down.
The money side is its own problem. Players in this city are paid per night, per set and per event, most of them as independent contractors, so there is no short term disability form waiting to be filed, and the only record of a normal month lives in a phone calendar and a scroll of payment notifications. Reconstructing lost income out of that is a different exercise than pulling three pay stubs from a drawer.
A Las Vegas firm that handles injury claims lists car accidents, brain injury, spinal cord injury and work injuries among its case types, keeps an accident benefits guide on its site, and offers a free case review. Naming it is the extent of what a piano bar guide can usefully do. We have no arrangement with the firm and no work of theirs to describe.
What performers can do without anyone's help is keep the paper. Confirmations for booked dates, the fee attached to each one, the teaching schedule, the deposit history. That folder is what separates a claim about lost work from a demonstration of it, and it takes about ten minutes a month to maintain. The same applies to the physical therapy receipts and the dates of every appointment, which are easy to collect in the moment and nearly impossible to rebuild a year later from memory.
Piano rooms run on substitutes and last minute calls, so an injury usually reaches the bandstand well before it reaches a lawyer. The firm lists a phone number, an email address and a review form, which is a short enough list to keep in a gig bag.