Court Opinion

ID: 9748743
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-27 16:11:45.076317+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:25:38.936621
License: Public Domain

CLIFFORD, J.,
dissenting.
Against the overpowering tide of facts and the strong current of well-established law our concurring colleagues swim to save plaintiffs’ case from dismissal on statute-of-limitations grounds. The novel idea floated today seems to be that because the doctors who treated plaintiff William Graves (reference hereinafter to “plaintiff” is to William) may not have accepted plaintiff’s theory of causative fault, plaintiff should not be barred by his own certain “knowledge” (correct or incorrect, it does not matter), gained at the moment of onset of his excruciating distress, that bicarbonate of soda caused his stomach to explode. Just short of five years after the cause of action arose and three years beyond the period that the legislature has fixed for starting suit, see N.J.S.A. 2A:14-2, plaintiffs filed their complaint.
The conventional two-year period of limitations is susceptible of modification by the “discovery” rule, but “only to the extent of postponing the commencement of accrual of the cause of action until plaintiff learns, or reasonably should learn, the existence of that state of facts [that] may equate in law with a cause of action.” Burd v. New Jersey Tel. Co., 76 N.J. 284, 291 (1978). Statement of the rule reveals its fact-sensitivity. In determining whether the circumstances permit this plaintiff to resort to the “discovery” rule, we should be mindful of the following undisputed facts:
*272(a) Both plaintiff and his wife are well-educated and employed by National Geographic Magazine, he as the Senior Assistant Editor in charge of expeditions and underwater archeology, she as an Assistant Vice President.
(b) On the day in question, August 22, 1979, plaintiffs lunch consisted of two bowls of soup and cookies, preceded by a vodka martini. Plaintiffs dinner, accompanied by red wine, consisted of homemade chili, cornbread, and salad, preceded by two vodka martinis and “Fritos,” and followed by “Tahiti” cookies and iced cognac.
(c) When plaintiff awoke about five hours after dinner, suffering from indigestion, he drank a mixture of water and defendant’s baking soda. After several swallows he experienced what he described as “instantaneous and massive pain,” the “worst pain” he had ever endured in his life, so severe that it drove him to his knees and produced cries that awakened his wife. As she sought to tend to and comfort him after an ambulance had been summoned, plaintiff, apprehensive of losing consciousness, instructed his wife to tell the medical attendants:
[A]ll I did was take baking soda. Some Arm & Hammer baking soda.
(d) In speaking to the emergency-room physician on arrival at the hospital, both plaintiff and his wife attributed the sudden onset of his pain to plaintiff’s ingestion of baking soda. While undergoing examination in the examining room plaintiff again attributed his acute pain to the baking soda. According to the emergency room physician, plaintiff “felt strongly” that the baking soda had “played a role” in his pain, which was experienced “very quickly after taking the baking soda.” The information was given “several times” that “the baking soda had caused the pain.” According to the physician, plaintiff pinpointed the baking soda as the source of his problem in an “agitated and flamboyant” manner, not by way of “a second thought or a weak feeling.”
*273(e) Plaintiff testified that he had never had any reason to believe that he had an ulcer. Despite the diagnosis in the hospital record of “gastric rent secondary to gastric ulcer,” the physician who so skillfully performed life-saving surgery on plaintiff did not think he was operating on an ulcer. He could not identify any ulcer or ulcerous tissue in the course of the surgery, and both the location and the large size of the tear on the lesser curvature of plaintiffs stomach were atypical for an ulcer.
(f) In April 1981 plaintiff was admitted to Georgetown University Hospital on account of a subphrenic abscess. He gave one of his physicians a history of gastric rupture secondary to sodium bicarbonate ingestion.
(g) About a year later, in March 1982, plaintiff returned to Georgetown University Hospital. At that time he told a nurse, as verified by her notation at the time, that he “[h]ad a repair of ruptured stomach secondary to bicarb ingestion in the summer of 1979.” On the same occasion he gave a surgical resident a history of having suffered a “tear in the anterior stomach following ingestion of sodium bicarbonate.” The resident understood plaintiff to be attributing the cause of the rupture to ingestion of baking soda.
Small wonder, then, in view of the foregoing, that the trial court, following the hearing required by Lopez v. Swyer, 62 N.J. 267 (1973), rejected plaintiffs claim that he did not know and could not have known “that state of facts [that] may equate in law with a cause of action” — the Burd formula — until he saw the Webber television tape in October 1983, as described in the concurring opinion, ante at 260. After first pointing out that plaintiffs expert established that both before and after plaintiffs 1979 experience there were reported incidents of gastric rupture following the ingestion of baking soda, and that the medical literature had for at least fifty years identified sodium bicarbonate as a cause of spontaneous stomach rupture, the trial court made the following critical findings of fact:
*2741. Plaintiff made the connection between the ingestion of baking soda and the ruptured stomach “almost immediately following the event.” He considered it important to convey to the medical people the information that his excruciating pain followed immediately his ingestion of defendant’s product.
2. Plaintiff was not “distracted” by the operating physician’s diagnosis, as appears in the first hospital record, of “gastric rent secondary to gastric ulcer.” Specifically, the assertion that plaintiff and the operating physician “did not at the very least discuss the fact that [the physician] did not on August 22, 1979, think he was operating on an ulcer” was incredible.
3. Plaintiff knew within the statute-of-limitations period that he had “a basis for an actionable claim” against defendant.
In the face of these formidable findings, some of which rest on appraisals of credibility, the Appellate Division and our concurring brethren have now concluded that plaintiff did not really “know” of the causative fault of defendant’s product until he viewed the Webber television tape. That tape contained the report of a physician’s statement in support of the relationship between defendant’s product and spontaneous rupture of the stomach, concluding with the observation that since 1926 six or seven cases of spontaneous stomach rupture had been reported in the medical literature. The Appellate Division acknowledged that
[although] the phenomenon of extreme abdominal pain immediately following ingestion of sodium bicarbonate might well cause an intelligent person to wonder if there was a causal as well as a chronological relation, the suspicion so engendered cannot be said to rise to the level of actual or constructive knowledge if his own physicians fail to recognize a causal connection. [Graves v. Church & Dwight Co., Inc., 225 N.J.Super. 49, 57 (1988).]
In the same vein, the concurring opinion rejects the trial court’s conclusion in respect of what plaintiff “knew,” because “[t]o suggest that the plaintiff should have known that the baking soda could cause a stomach rupture would be to attribute to him a knowledge superior to that of [his physicians] * * Ante at 262.
*275And so, despite the concurring members’ effort to lull the reader with the reassurance that this appeal concerns no more than a little old “factual controversy,” ante at 257, really nothing to get excited about, nothing new, ante at 270, in fact our colleagues’ effort would mark a major departure from settled law, not just in its elbowing-aside of the trial court’s findings, but more significantly in its establishing a new test for application of the “discovery” rule. Henceforth the cause of action in a personal injury case would be deemed to arise not when plaintiff is aware of the facts that may equate in law with a cause of action, but rather when plaintiff and his or her physicians are prepared to prove the medical connection. And so while ignorance of the law remains no excuse, the professional’s medical “unawareness” (no need to resort to the pejorative “ignorance”) would act to excuse a plaintiff’s failure to file a complaint in time. Before disallowing application of the discovery rule, a court would have to conclude not simply that plaintiff was aware of facts bespeaking the causative fault of the offending instrumentality, but that his physicians as well were prepared to prove that plaintiff’s theory was correct, that plaintiff’s understanding was in fact accurate. That change in our law would be not merely significant, it would be avulsive; and anyone who really believes that the concurring opinion represents nothing more than some fine-tuning of our existing rule and does no violence to precedent should straightaway repair to Brooklyn, there to take immediate advantage of a golden opportunity to strike a bargain on a swell old bridge.
It seems to me that our traditional formulation of the rule is sufficient as is, and that adding to it yet another layer of required proof would unnecessarily and unwisely complicate an area of our law not renowned for its simplicity. As far as plaintiff was concerned, he “knew” from day one — from instant one — that his difficulties stemmed from his ingestion of defendant’s product. It takes not much deductive reasoning to conclude that if ingestion of an antacid, designed to relieve stomach distress, immediately produces excruciating stomach *276pain, there may be something wrong with the antacid: either the chemical formula is bad or the batch from which the offending dosage was taken is bad, an impression well fortified in this case by the absence of any reason for plaintiff to believe that he had an ulcer and the later reinforcement of that opinion by the failure of discovery of an ulcer during surgery. There may of course be other possible causes of the dramatic result, but here the plaintiff never wavered from his original conclusion — the same conclusion that forms the basis for this suit. He was not put off (“distracted,” as the trial court put it in its unchallenged finding) by his physician’s unsupported diagnosis. He continued in the years following the event to include in his medical history the connection between defendant’s product and his stomach rupture. And he ultimately sued the very same defendant whose product he named as he lay writhing on the floor in pain.
The concurring opinion makes the “discovery” rule turn on an exercise in epistemology: what is “knowledge”? For me it is not necessary that it be established in a Lopez hearing that a plaintiff is correct in his or her theory of causative fault, for if that were a requirement, a defendant seeking to defeat the “discovery rule” modification of the statute would have to prove the plaintiff’s case. It is quite enough that a plaintiff know, within the statutory period, the facts of injury and causal relationship that may afford a cause of action — a component of our “discovery” rule that serves to distinguish our law from the demonstrably different law of other jurisdictions to which the concurrence resorts, ante at 268-269, in its effort to find some support somewhere for its theory, so plainly foreign to our own well-established and long-accepted formulation of the “discovery” rule.
Despite his physicians’ unawareness of the critical medical phenomenon that plaintiff alleges is at the heart of his case, the record shows that in fact that phenomenon has been reported in the medical literature for over half a century. If our concurring colleagues’ medicine is accurate, as their law manifestly is *277not, the explanation for plaintiffs plight is so disarmingly elementary as to make one wonder how any ninny could not know of the hazards of taking defendant’s product on a full stomach. See ante at 263-264: (a) indigestion can be produced by stomach acidity; (b) sodium bicarbonate reacts with and neutralizes stomach acids, but (c) in the process the bicarb releases carbon dioxide gas, which (d) sometimes pushes against the stomach walls, which (e) can burst if weak or distended with food. As the concurrence says, “very simple.” Ante at 263.
In a word, plaintiff’s original — and current — theory of the case is not “off the wall”; it is not as if plaintiff were claiming that as a result of his use of a defendant-manufacturer’s razor blade, he came down with kidney stones or Dupuytren’s contracture immediately after shaving!
Finally, this case is readily distinguishable from Vispisiano v. Ashland Chemical Co., 107 N.J. 416 (1987), not because that case involved a toxic tort (I agree with the Appellate Division that the Vispisiano principle should not be so confined), but because unlike Graves, the plaintiff in Vispisiano had only the foggiest idea of the connection between his medical condition and his brief employment at a toxic-waste disposal site. There, as the Appellate Division points out, the medical cause was “arcane.” 225 N.J.Super. at 56. There was nothing “arcane” about the connection here: Graves drank the stuff and dropped to the floor. He perceived the connection immediately. I would hold his claim barred by the statute of limitations, wherefore I vote to reverse.
POLLOCK and GARIBALDI, JJ., join in this opinion.
For affirmance — Chief Justice WILENTZ, and Justices O’HERN and STEIN — 3.
For reversal — Justice CLIFFORD, Justice POLLOCK and Justice GARIBALDI — 3.