Court Opinion

ID: 9538404
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 07:36:07.8208+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T14:57:51.117456
License: Public Domain

OPALA, Justice,
concurring:
From my past experience1 I know there exists some uneasiness and uncertainty about the meaning of Haynes v. Pryor High School, Okl., 566 P.2d 852 [1976]. My concern is that we now clearly mark out the limits of that decision for evenhanded consistency in its future application.
Haynes, in my opinion, is not to be regarded as confined to heart cases. Its message to me is much more general. It is that when accident, in the industrial-law sense, is said to consist of some internal failure that is deemed attributable to objectively imperceptible trauma with destructive force dependent entirely on the varying tolerance levels of a human organism, the required proof must show some resulting change in the affected person’s pathology.2 An episode of pain [without that accompanying change] will not do as an accident because pain, by itself, is but a symptom of some underlying process or, at best, a warning of something yet to come.
The Haynes rationale is quite inapposite when as here the accident is said to consist of a pre-existing and known pathology being either accelerated or advanced. Here it is sufficient when a physician’s opinion attributes an “extension” or enlargement of the old, known and described condition to the proved efforts of on-the-job labor. A more detailed explanation of how the pathology was altered in course of being “aggravated” may be left to cross-examination.3
In short, Haynes governs claims of strain-induced internal injury, and is not to be applied to an aggravation of a pre-existing, known internal pathology.

. As former judge of the Workers’ Compensation Court.

. Here the change in pathology stands included as an element in proving the accidental origin of the breakdown because strain, coupled with an internal change in pathology resulting from it, is deemed ipso facto an accidental injury. H. J. Jeffries Truck Line v. Grisham, Okl., 397 P.2d 637, 641 [1964].

.Here the factum of an “enlarged” pathology is not an essential ingredient in proving the accident. Rather it affects the extent of disability to be awarded. This approach also accords with the new Oklahoma Evidence Code, 12 O.S.Supp.1978 § 2705.