Court Opinion

ID: 9702974
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 23:35:13.093173+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:21:44.369841
License: Public Domain

DISSENTING OPINION BY
STEVENS, J.:
¶ 1 I join in Judge Musmanno’s Dissent in its entirety, but write separately to amplify that “actual cancer diagnosis” damages are separate and distinct from “fear of an increased risk of cancer” damages flowing from nonmalignant asbestos-related disease.4 The United States Supreme *396Court made this very distinction in a recent decision instructive5 to our case.
¶ 2 In Norfolk & Western Ry. v. Ayers, 538 U.S. 135, 123 S.Ct. 1210, 155 L.Ed.2d 261 (2003), the United States Supreme Court held that the Federal Employers’ Liability Act (FELA), incorporating the common law “separate disease rule,” allowed railroad employees suffering from work-related asbestosis — a nonmalignant lung ¶ 4 cancer. In so holding, the Court examined the “separate disease rule” and reasoned:
There is no inevitable conflict between the “separate disease rule” and recovery of cancer fear damages by asbestosis claimants. The rule simply allows recovery for successive diseases and would necessarily exclude only double recovery for the same element of damages.
Ayers, 538 U.S. at 153 n. 12, 123 S.Ct. 1210 (emphasis added). The Court thus recognized present fear that asbestosis heralds a future cancer as a recoverable damage discrete from damages attending any cancer that might arise in the future. See Ayers at 153, 156, 123 S.Ct. 1210 (citing the inequitable result obtained by excluding present recovery for the fear experienced by an asbestosis sufferer who never gets cancer; “In light of this evidence, an asbestosis sufferer would have good cause for increased apprehension about his vulnerability to another illness from his exposure, a disease that inflicts ‘agonizing, unremitting pain,’ relieved only by death.”)
¶ 3 Ayers is thus instructive insofar as it shows the conceptual flaw in the Majority’s approach of lumping all so-called “cancer-based” claims together for the purpose of holding that prior recovery of “fear of increased risk of cancer” damages precludes present recovery of “actual cancer” damages. In fact, the damages do not equate. The Abrams’ 1986 fear claim did not seek recovery for the fear one expects to experience after terminal cancer is diag*397nosed in the future. Rather, it sought recovery for the fear already experienced from having a disease known to presage cancer.6 Subsequent recovery for actual cancer damages would therefore not run afoul of the separate disease rule’s prohibition against “double recovery for the same element of damages.” Nor, for that matter, would the Abrams — or the Shaws for that matter — receive a windfall recovery of damages never actually suffered, a principal inequity of the old single-action rule, for Appellants press their claims in the name of decedents.
¶4 Fifteen years ago, this Court professed that fair resolution of latent asbestos disease claims required us to eschew “blind adherence to rigid concepts” in favor of taking an “enlightened approach” enabling plaintiffs to assert timely claims for separate, distinct diseases as they arise. See Marinari v. Asbestos Corp., 417 Pa.Super. 440, 612 A.2d 1021, 1027-28 (1992). The change was seen as necessary to protect those who developed the most severe injuries caused by asbestos. Today, we deny an asbestos plaintiff who seeks, for the first time, damages on a timely claim for the ultimate asbestos injury, terminal cancer, and instead limit him to the lesser and distinct damages he received seventeen years earlier for living with the fear that his lung disease possibly heralded cancer. This is precisely the inequitable result our new policy was intended to avoid. Accordingly, I join in the Dissent.

. In their respective civil complaints filed in the 1980s, both the Abrams and the Shaws alleged the husband/plaintiff was caused to contract, inter alia, other diseases not yet diagnosed, the full extent of which are not yet known. Only the Shaws’ complaint, however, went further to claim "In addition, there is a risk of mesothelioma and other cancers, some or all of which may be permanent and eventually fatal....” It was this specific claim, alone, that raised the increased risk of cancer claim in the Shaws’ complaint. The Abrams complaint, in contrast, never delineated an increased risk of cancer claim. Rather, the only “cancer-related” claim specifically delineated in the Abrams’ complaint was a claim for "fear of increased risk of cancer” that husband/plaintiff was then experiencing. As explained infra, a fear of cancer claim contemplates an element of damages that differs from a cancer diagnosis claim. Consequently, I cannot conclude that the Abrams’ present cancer claim was actually raised or necessarily decided in their 1986 action so as to bar their present action.
Determining that the Abrams’ prior action neither sought nor recovered the damages sought in their present action, I would find their present action viable under McCauley v. Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corp., 715 A.2d 1125 (Pa.Super.1998), where we declined to impose a limitations bar on a Marinari-era action for asbestosis that could have been brought six years earlier during the single-action rule era when the plaintiff first discovered a lesser, but nonetheless actionable, asbestos-related disease.
*396In McCauley, the plaintiff received a 1985 diagnosis of asbestos-related, asymptomatic pleural thickening. Because such an injury was actionable at the time, the plaintiff was required under the governing single-action rule to file a cause of action for all present and future asbestos-related claims within two years of his 1985 discovery. The plaintiff, however, allowed the limitations period to run without filing suit, ostensibly waiving all asbestos claims under the single-action rule. In 1993, after this Court instituted the two-disease rule in Marinan, the plaintiff filed a complaint seeking damages for pulmonary asbestosis, which had been diagnosed less than two years earlier. Defendants argued that plaintiff's claim was barred because his two year limitations period for all present and future asbestos-related disease, including future asbestosis, commenced upon his 1985 discovery of asymptomatic pleural thickening and had thus run by 1987.
This Court disagreed. Applying the two disease rule, we held plaintiff had indeed waived his asymptomatic pleural thickening cause of action as of 1987, but had preserved his cause of action for the separate and distinct disease of asbestosis when he filed his claim within two years of the 1991 asbestosis diagnosis. Thus, the fact that plaintiff had foregone an action encompassing a future asbestosis claim during the single-action rule era did not bar him six years later from proceeding on a present asbestosis action filed timely during the two-disease rule era.
The same result should attain here for the Abrams. Having delineated only a fear of cancer claim in their 1986 complaint, they forewent recovery on a future, cancer (increased risk of cancer) claim under the single-action rule. Under McCauley, however, the Abrams' election to forego a future cancer claim during the single-action rule era should not bar their present cancer claim filed timely during the two-disease rule era.

. Though we are bound by United States Supreme Court decisions that address matters of federal law, the present case involves no federal issue. We are thus bound here only by prior decisions of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and of this Court en banc.

. That our jurisprudence has adopted the policy of now requiring claimants to defer "fear of increased risk of cancer claims” until after receiving a cancer diagnosis does not affect the analysis here. The fear of developing a future cancer and the fear experienced while having cancer are two distinct elements of damages.