Court Opinion

ID: 9483316
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:17:07.667945+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:33.334524
License: Public Domain

SWEET, District Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent. The existence of genuine issues of fact as to when Gnazzo “discovered or in the exercise of reasonable care should have [discovered]” her injury should have led the district court to deny Searle’s motion for summary judgment.
I have no dispute with the majority’s articulation of the elements of the applicable Connecticut statute of limitations. For statute of limitations purposes, a cause of action accrues when a plaintiff suffers actionable harm. Champagne v. Raybestos-Manhattan, Inc., 212 Conn. 509, 521, 562 A.2d 1100, 1107 (1989). Actionable harm occurs when the plaintiff discovers, or should have discovered through the exercise of reasonable care, both that she has suffered physical harm and that there is a causal connection between that harm and the allegedly wrongful conduct of the defendant. Id.; Hamilton v. Smith, 773 F.2d 461, 464 (2d Cir.1985). Nevertheless, I disagree that, applying this standard to these facts, a trier of fact could not find that Gnazzo brought this action within the three-year limitations period.
What the majority would do here today is very much like that which this Court refused to do in Hamilton v. Smith, 773 F.2d 461 (2d Cir.1985). At issue in Hamilton was the interpretation of the analogous Connecticut limitations period for bringing suit in a medical malpractice action.
The plaintiff’s decedent (“Hamilton”) injured his thumbnail in 1956. In 1959, the defendant, a Dr. Smith, treated him for the injury, diagnosed the problem as chronic paronychia, an inflammatory infection, and excised part of the nail. In 1965, Hamilton was admitted to the hospital where Dr. Smith operated on his thumb. After analyzing a tissue sample taken from the thumb, the hospital pathologist reported to Dr. Smith that Hamilton’s condition was paronychia.
Lumps developed on Hamilton’s thumb, and in 1973 a doctor in Florida biopsied the tissue and found cancer. In 1975, the thumb was amputated. The cancer spread over the next three years. In 1979, Hamilton learned that slides of the tissue samples tested in 1965 kept by the hospital revealed that the cancer was evident when the tissue was examined in 1965, thus indicating that Dr. Smith had misdiagnosed his condition. Due to the spread of the cancer, Hamilton died in 1980, after which his wife brought an action against Dr. Smith and the hospital for negligent misdiagnosis. Id. at 462-63.
The district court granted summary judgment for the defendant, finding that the limitations clock began to run when Hamilton learned that he had cancer in 1975, four and one-half years prior to his wife’s commencement of the action. This Court reversed, holding that by inquiring only as to when Hamilton discovered his physical injury, the district court had improperly construed the meaning of the statute. Under a proper construction of the statute, according to this Court, the limitation starts to run “when the plaintiff discovers both that he has suffered physical harm and the causal connection between that harm and the alleged negligent con*140duct of the defendant.” Id. at 464 (emphasis added). The Court wrote that:
With discovery rules, the limitations period clock does not begin to tick as long as the plaintiff is unaware of the right he seeks to assert.... Under the district court's interpretation of the injury in the instant case, the statute would start tolling plaintiff’s rights when the plaintiff learned of his physical injury, even if he had not yet discovered its cause. So read, the limitations period for bringing suit might well be over before a plaintiff even knew that he had a cause of action. This scenario is one that the discovery rule was designed to avoid .... [I]t is more consistent with the general purpose of a discovery rule to commence the limitation period only when the plaintiff discovers the legal injury.
Id. at 465 (emphasis added).
In Hamilton, the potential issue of fact precluding summary judgment related to the “causal connection” element of the “discovery” equation. In this case, by contrast, there are genuine issues of fact as to the other half of the equation. Namely, it is unclear on the facts that were before the district court whether Gnazzo discovered or should have discovered her physical injury — her infertility — outside the three-year limitations period.
The district court and the majority regard Gnazzo’s questionnaire as dispositive of any dispute as to whether she discovered or should have discovered in 1981 that she was injured by Searle’s Cu-7. Nevertheless, drawing all inferences and resolving all ambiguities in favor of Gnazzo, as a court must on summary judgment, Bay v. Times Mirror Magazines, Inc., 936 F.2d 112, 116 (2d Cir.1991), I find neither this statement nor any other evidence submitted on the motion sufficient to warrant summary judgment dismissing the complaint.
As a preliminary matter, the pivotal questionnaire “admission” is ambiguous by its own terms. Gnazzo states that
I was married in Apr. 1981 so I stopped using birth control so I could get pregnant — nothing ever happened (of course) then I started hearing and reading about how damaging IUD’s could be. I figured that was the problem however my marriage started to crumble so I never pressed the issue.
Joint App. at 171 (emphasis added). While the context of the statement makes understandable the majority’s inference that Gnazzo discovered her injury and its causal nexus to Searle in 1981, it is also possible that Gnazzo was referring to some other “problem” associated with the Cu-7. Given the procedural posture of this motion, the district court should have resolved this ambiguity in favor of Gnazzo.
Even if the “problem” to which Gnazzo was referring was her difficulty conceiving in 1981, however, that is all the undisputed facts establish the problem, as “discovered” by Gnazzo, to have been. Difficulty becoming pregnant is not infertility.
Furthermore, because it is unclear on the facts when the injury actually occurred, there is a factual issue as to whether Gnaz-zo “in the exercise of reasonable care should have ... discovered” her inability to become pregnant prior to 1989. As late as June 1986 and October 1987, when Gnazzo sought fertility counseling, she was informed that the general findings of a post-coital test were “excellent,” and that a hysterosalpingogram showed that she had a normal uterus and oviducts and that her left oviduct was open or patent. In the absence of facts establishing that these were misdiagnoses or that the methodology of these examinations was incomplete,1 an open question of fact remains to be tried. Cf. Burns v. Hartford Hosp., 192 Conn. 451, 472 A.2d 1257, 1260 (1984) (“Dr. Cooke’s alleged misdiagnosis, however, did *141not toll the statute of limitations as it applied to Hartford Hospital.”).
This court itself has stated that “[w]e do not think it the purpose of this part of Connecticut’s statute of limitations that the game be over before a plaintiff has had his innings.” Hamilton, 773 F.2d at 462. By-affirming the district court’s holding that Gnazzo “discovered” her infertility in 1981, the Court is condoning the use of this statute for precisely that purpose.

. Dr. Desper testified in her deposition that she was aware of Gnazzo’s bouts with PID and use of the IUD. See Joint App. at 143-44, 146-47. She also testified that she knew that PID could affect fertility. Given this knowledge, and Gnazzo’s specific, fertility-related reason for consulting Dr. Desper, it is reasonable to infer that Dr. Desper’s examinations included a consideration of whether PID or IUD related problems existed.