Court Opinion

ID: 9613322
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 04:16:08.419465+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:03:28.034488
License: Public Domain

BISTLINE, Justice,
specially concurring.
My concurrence is reluctantly given. It intuitively seems unfair that Bush is denied recovery even though the work-related incidents in question caused him disabling pain when, in all likelihood, had he persisted in overexerting and thereby suffered a “heart attack,” then he might have recovered. This result, however, apparently flows from the statutory definition of injury as “violence to the physical structure of the body.” Thus despite the fact that claimant’s pain may have been in effect just as disabling as the physical injury of a “heart attack,” I am brought to concur in affirming the Commission’s holding that there was no compensable injury because there is no evidence on the record which demonstrates that Bush suffered any discernible destruction or damage to the physical structure of his body. In this view we may all be much in error, but I am admittedly hard-pressed to derive the intended meaning of the statutory language. A hard blow to the heart area of the chest, for instance, would surely be a “violence to the physical structure of the body,” and might or might not result in discernible damage. For certain such a hard blow would likely at least produce pain, even though fleeting. What, then, if the pain continues to exist, but the practitioners are unable to pinpoint the source? Pain, as I have understood it, is but a symptom of an injury, and where there is pain, is there not an injury at least in the sense that until the pain can be relieved or removed, the patient is disabled or disadvantaged?