Chase v. Sabin

• Decision Date: 17 May 1994
• Docket Number: No. 95889,No. 9,95889,9
• Citation: 516 N.W.2d 60,445 Mich. 190
• Parties: Durward CHASE, Jr., Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Fred C. SABIN, M.D., Frederick C. Sabin, M.D., P.C., and Marquette General Hospital, formerly known as St. Luke's Hospital, Defendants-Appellees. Calendar
• Court: Michigan Supreme Court

Page 60

516 N.W.2d 60

445 Mich. 190

Durward CHASE, Jr., Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Fred C. SABIN, M.D., Frederick C. Sabin, M.D., P.C., and Marquette General Hospital, formerly known as St Luke's Hospital, Defendants-Appellees.

No. 95889.

Calendar No. 9.

Supreme Court of Michigan.

Argued Jan. 11, 1994.

Decided May 17, 1994.

[445 Mich. 191] David R. Parker, Sharon S. Lutz, Charfoos & Christensen, P.C., Detroit, for plaintiff-appellant.

E. Nickolas Bridges, Caroline Bridges, Bridges and Houghton, Negaunee, for defendant-appellee.

OPINION

MICHAEL F. CAVANAGH, Chief Justice.

In this appeal, we are asked to determine when a cause of action for the negligent acts of a hospital and its agent ¹ accrues for statute of limitations purposes. ² We hold that the discovery rule governs when the cause of action accrues. Accordingly, we reverse the decision of the Court of Appeals.

I

The plaintiff, Durward Chase, Jr., underwent consecutive eye surgeries on April 12 and April 17, 1963, to remove cataracts, apparently caused by job-related welding flashes. Defendant, Dr. Fred C. Sabin, performed both surgeries while the plaintiff was a patient at the defendant hospital.

In 1963, the removal of cataracts required two procedures. During the first procedure, the surgeon broke up the lens of the eye, allowing the lens to dissolve so it could be washed out of the eye during the second procedure. While the first procedure was generally performed in a hospital, only a local anesthetic was used. Dr. Sabin administered the local anesthetic and completed the first procedure without incident.

The second procedure required the cutting of the cornea to facilitate the irrigation of the previously broken up lens. The preferred anesthetic for the second procedure was general anesthesia because under general anesthesia, you have an immobile eyelid and patient. Unlike the first procedure, Dr. Sabin did not administer the anesthetic during the second procedure. Instead, Nurse Neff, a nurse anesthetist and employee of the defendant hospital, administered the general anesthesia. ³

Despite Dr. Sabin's instructions that the anesthetist keep the plaintiff asleep, the plaintiff awoke soon after the operation began. ⁴ At this point, the plaintiff involuntarily squeezed the eye hard enough that some of the vitreous humor ⁵ came out of the eye and the cortex extruded. After this incident, Dr. Sabin completed the operation as best as he could.

After the operation, the doctor did not inform the nineteen-year-old plaintiff or his father about the loss of vitreous humor because such a loss was not necessarily incompatible with a successful result. The doctor never informed the plaintiff, who was treated by the doctor until 1988, of the loss despite the fact that the plaintiff's eye rapidly deteriorated, resulting in the removal of the eye one year after the procedures. Instead, Dr. Sabin informed the plaintiff that a detached retina, which he opined resulted from the plaintiff's fall off a horse a few weeks following surgery, caused the decline of the eye.

In 1988, during the pursuit of a worker's compensation claim, the plaintiff's attorney obtained a hospital record of the surgery that indicated that during the second procedure the plaintiff lifted his hand and squeezed his eye. In April 1989, the plaintiff commenced suit against Dr. Sabin and the defendant hospital. ⁶ The plaintiff alleged that the loss of anesthetic control led the partially conscious plaintiff to damage his eye and eventually lose his vision.

The trial court granted the defendant hospital's motion for summary disposition on the ground that the statute of limitations barred the plaintiff's negligence claim. ⁷ The Court of Appeals affirmed in a two to one unpublished per curiam opinion. ⁸ This Court granted plaintiff's application for leave to appeal. ⁹

II

The statute governing the plaintiff's claim affords a plaintiff three years from the date the claim accrues to commence a negligence suit. ¹⁰ The corresponding accrual statute provided that "the claim accrues at the time the wrong upon which the claim is based was done regardless of the time when damage results." M.C.L. § 600.5827; M.S.A. § 27A.5827. Under limited circumstances, this Court has determined that the discovery rule governs the date certain claims accrue, despite identical statutory language. See Moll v. Abbott Laboratories, 444 Mich. 1, 12-13, 506 N.W.2d 816 (1993); Larson v. Johns-Manville Sales Corp, 427 Mich. 301, 308, 312, 399 N.W.2d 1 (1986); Johnson v. Caldwell, 371 Mich. 368, 379, 123 N.W.2d 785 (1963). ¹¹

The policy prompting the Court to utilize the discovery rule generally centers on our attempt to avoid the premature bar of a cause of action and to provide, instead, a reasonable time to bring suit.

A

A statute of limitation should provide plaintiffs with a reasonable opportunity to commence suit. For over one hundred years, this Court has sought to fulfill this purpose, construing statutes accordingly. As Justice Cooley explained:

The general power of the legislature to pass statutes of limitation is not doubted. The time that these statutes shall allow for bringing suits is to be fixed by the legislative judgment, and where the legislature has fairly exercised its discretion, no court is at liberty to review its action, and to annul the law, because in their opinion the legislative power has been unwisely exercised. But the legislative authority is not so entirely unlimited that, under the name of a statute limiting the time within which a party shall resort to his legal remedy, all remedy whatsoever may be taken away.... It is of the essence of a law of limitation that it shall afford a reasonable time within which suit may be brought.... [ Price v. Hopkin, 13 Mich. 318, 324-325 (1865).]

Our adherence to this principle resulted in our holding that the term "wrong," as stated in the accrual statute, designated the date on which the plaintiff was harmed by the defendant's negligent act, as opposed to the date the defendant acted negligently. Connelly v. Paul Ruddy's Equipment Repair & Service Co, 388 Mich. 146, 200 N.W.2d 70 (1972). Necessity dictated such a conclusion because an opposite interpretation could potentially bar a plaintiff's legitimate cause of action before the plaintiff's injury.

Similarly, because statutes of limitation do not evidence a legislative intent to extinguish a cause of action before the plaintiff is aware of the possible cause of action, we have adopted the discovery rule in the appropriate instances. Last term, in Moll, supra, 444 Mich. at 13, 506 N.W.2d 816, we held that the discovery rule controls the date a pharmaceutical products liability action accrues. "If the three-year period of limitation began to run at the time of the defendant's breach, most, if not all, claims would be barred before the plaintiff had reason to know of the injury and the cause of the injury. Such an interpretation seeks 'to declare the bread stale before it is baked.' " (Citation omitted.) The same reasoning compelled our application of the discovery rule to products liability actions premised on asbestos related injuries, Larson, supra. In Southgate School Dist. v. West Side Construction Co, 399 Mich. 72, 82, 247 N.W.2d 884 (1976), we held that the discovery rule governs the date a breach of warranty claim accrues, providing plaintiffs with an adequate opportunity to bring suit. See also Williams v. Polgar, 391 Mich. 6, 215 N.W.2d 149 (1974) (the discovery rule governs the accrual of negligent misrepresentation cases), and Dyke v. Richard, 390 Mich. 739, 213 N.W.2d 185 (1973) (the discovery rule governs the accrual of medical malpractice cases).

B

While the plaintiff's claim lies in negligence, the essence of the hospital's alleged wrong is substantially similar to medical malpractice. In fact, under the current statutory scheme, ¹² an action for the identical alleged wrong would be correctly characterized as a medical malpractice action. In light of the similarity, it is beneficial to review our resolution of analogous medical malpractice cases.

In Johnson, supra, the plaintiff, experiencing post partum complications, relied on her doctor's advice that nothing could be done for her condition. Despite a three-year lapse from the date of the doctor's alleged wrong to the date the plaintiff filed suit, the Court held that the two-year medical malpractice period of limitation did not bar the plaintiff's suit. ¹³ The Court refused to impose on the plaintiff a duty of discovering the wrong, despite the obvious physical complication, before another physician's advice regarding the earlier breach. The Court refused to "punish the patient who relies upon his doctor's advice and place[ ] a premium on skepticism and distrust." Id., 371 Mich. at 379, 123 N.W.2d 785. As a result we held:

The limitation statute or statutes in malpractice cases do not start to run until the date of discovery, or the date when, by the exercise of reasonable care, plaintiff should have discovered the wrongful act. [Id.]

In Dyke, supra, we examined whether the discovery rule, as applied to malpractice cases, continued to have effect in light of the Legislature's codification of the last treatment rule. ¹⁴ Because a statute of limitation is not a statute designed to abrogate a common-law cause of action, we applied the discovery rule, refusing to infer a legislative intent to abolish the plaintiff's cause of action. "Since '[i]t is of the essence of a law of limitation that it shall afford a reasonable time within which suit may be brought ...,' a statute which extinguishes the right to bring suit cannot be enforced as a law of limitation." Id., 390 Mich. at 746, 213 N.W.2d 185 (citation omitted).

C

We would be remiss if we examined the issue presented without considering the additional policies prompting the adoption of statutes of limitation. While one policy is to afford plaintiffs a reasonable...