On January 12, 2000, Wilbert Barnes visited his physician, Dr. Chuckwudi Bato Amu, with a complaint of rectal bleeding. Dr. Amu diagnosed a hemorrhoid condition and prescribed suppositories to relieve the discomfort. Within two weeks, the bleeding stopped completely. Believing that the hemorrhoid condition diagnosed by Dr. Amu had resolved itself, Mr. Barnes never again consulted that physician. In 2002, Mr. Barnes began to see Dr. Bruce Ramsdell as his primary care physician. Over the next year, he had several appointments with Dr. Ramsdell, none of which revealed the existence of a colon problem. In the Spring of 2004, Mr. Barnes began to have episodes of abdominal cramping, nausea and dizziness. In June, those episodes became more severe, and were accompanied by a recurrence of rectal bleeding. Blood work revealed that Mr. Barnes had severe anemia, and Dr. Ramsdell referred him to a gastroenterologist who performed a colonoscopy. In the course of that procedure, a large tumor was discovered which was determined to be cancerous. The cancer discovered in Mr. Barnes’ colon had spread, and was classified as terminal.
In December of 2004, Mr. Barnes and his wife Appellees filed a medical malpractice action against Dr. Amu and his employer, Atlanta Medical Care, PC Appellants, alleging a claim for negligent misdiagnosis. Appellants answered and raised the statute of limitations as an affirmative defense. They did not formally move to dismiss on that ground. At trial, however, they filed a motion in limine, contending that the applicable two-year period of limitations began to run from the date of the alleged misdiagnosis in January of 2000 and, thus, had expired prior to the initiation of the lawsuit. The trial court denied the motion and allowed the trial to proceed, concluding that the statute of limitations commenced when the symptoms of metastatic colon cancer first manifested themselves to Mr. Barnes in 2004. At trial, Mr. Barnes’ experts opined that Dr. Amu should have had a sigmoidoscopy or colonoscopy performed on Mr. Barnes within a few months of the January 12 appointment. They further opined to a reasonable degree of medical certainty that if Dr. Amu had complied with the standard of care, the visual inspection of the colon would have revealed either a pre-malignant polyp or a very early malignancy that had not yet spread to the lymph nodes and liver, which could have been successfully removed surgically without any further complications. Amu v. Barnes , 286 Ga. App. 725, 727-728 650 SE2d 288 2007. The jury returned a verdict for Appellees, and the trial court entered judgment against Appellants.On appeal, Appellants raised the statute of limitations issue. The Court of Appeals recognized that, as a general rule, the period of limitations begins to run immediately on the date of the alleged negligent misdiagnosis. Nevertheless, the trial court’s ruling was affirmed, based on
