Opinion ID: 2027645
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Failure to Circumscribe the Cumulative Injury Period With Specific Beginning and Ending Dates.

Text: At the time of the hearing, the commissioner found that petitioner's injuries to her thumb, arms, and shoulder constituted one cumulative compensable injury that occurred on July 8, 1987, which was the date when she was first forced to leave work for her carpal tunnel surgery. In her posthearing brief to the deputy commissioner, she requested that a finding of a cumulative injury period ending date of May 14, 1990, be assigned. The deputy commissioner declined this request. In petitioner's appeal brief to the commissioner, she assigned as error the deputy's refusal to identify an ending date of her cumulative injury. Her theory underlying this argument is that an ending date should be established so as to demarcate this cumulative injury from any subsequent injuries. We disagree. The recognition of the cumulative injury doctrine as a basis for recovery of workers' compensation benefits must be reconciled with the general statutory scheme for payment of benefits. This requires that a date of injury be established in order that it may be known which employer and carrier is at risk, whether notice of injury and claim are within the statutory period, whether statutory amendments were in effect, which wage basis applies, and other important considerations. See Oscar Mayer Foods Corp. v. Tasler, 483 N.W.2d 824, 829 (Iowa 1992). This date is to be tied, as nearly as possible, to the time at which the disability first manifests itself. Id. In the present case, the commissioner determined this time to have been July 8, 1987, when petitioner was first forced to leave work for her carpal tunnel surgery. Petitioner makes no challenge to this finding as an appropriate date of injury. Once the commissioner established a date of injury, he was under no further obligation to fix a time of beginning for the period of cumulative events that produced the manifestation of injury on July 8, 1987. Those events, although important evidence in the case, need not be precisely fixed as to time of occurrence. Similarly, once it is determined that the disability manifested itself on a particular date, that is the ending date for purposes of the commissioner's adjudication. Occurrences subsequent to that date are not outcome determinative. Thus, there would be no purpose in the commissioner's establishing a chronology as to those subsequent occurrences.