Court Opinion

ID: 9613057
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 04:13:50.73434+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:03:24.669754
License: Public Domain

Toal, Justice,
dissenting:
I respectfully dissent. Eddie Mae Johnson (“Johnson”) first began experiencing difficulties when she was transferred to the weave room of Greenwood Mill’s Mill #5 where she was exposed to chemicals. She originally consulted the company physician. After some time, Greenwood Mill’s physician re*252ferred Johnson to Dr. Henderson, a local dermatologist. Dr. Henderson diagnosed Johnson as suffering from atopic dermatitis and treated her accordingly. Johnson’s condition continued to worsen. Although not disabled, Johnson was fired from her job of more than twenty years at Greenwood Mills. Faced with mounting medical bills, no medical insurance and no job, Johnson filed a worker’s compensation claim. Greenwood Mills, a self-insured company, denied Johnson’s claim. The claim was then presented to the Workers’ Compensation Commission. The single commissioner issued his order in July 1987. He found that Johnson’s condition was not job related. In making this ruling, the single commissioner relied on the testimony of Dr. Henderson. It was after the filing of her claim but prior to the single commissioner’s order that Johnson was finally diagnosed by a Medical University of South Carolina physician with mycosis fungoides, a rare, fatal skin cancer. This claimant relied on company doctors who told her that her skin disease was not employment related. Now, it turns out that her condition is job related and she is dying from it. The company not only denied her benefits, it fired her. The majority points to Commissioner Talley’s order of July 7, 1987 which finds that “claimant did not sustain an injury by accident or an occupational disease.” (Emphasis added.) In 1987, the claim was not really presented as an occupational disease but rather as a single skin fungus injury caused by an accident on the job. It was not until an independent expert was consulted, after the claim was filed and as her condition worsened, that it was learned that she has a fatal skin disease contracted as the result of on-the-job exposure to toxic fumes. The single commissioner in 1987 simply gratuitously ruled on the occupational disease issue. In my view, this was a ruling on an issue completely outside the pleadings. To now hold, as the majority does, that although claimant was unaware her injury was an occupational disease and thus did not plead it as such, she, nevertheless, litigated it and lost it in the fist adjudication defies logic and justice. In my view, allowing Greenwood Mills to rely on the doctrine of res judicata is utterly inequitable under these facts. The circuit court held that the claimant could not have known the occupational disease was caused by her employment until 1990 and therefore her claim was not barred by res judicata. I would affirm this ruling.
*253Finney, J., concurs.