The Acoustic Neuroma Anomaly: The Need for a Legislative Fix to an Unintended Consequence of Lavern's Law in Cases Involving a Failure To Diagnose Non-Cancerous or Benign Tumors
As it stands today, and as it is unlikely to change without an act of the state legislature, a plaintiff who is the victim of blatant medical malpractice but does not become aware of it until after two-and-a-half years from the initial treatment date, will not have any recourse if the condition is not either cancer or a malignant tumor.
June 08, 2022 at 11:00 AM
9 minute read
Imagine you wake up one morning with a pounding migraine headache. You go to the doctor and the doctor orders an MRI. The results come back, and the doctor tells you that there are no abnormal findings in the MRI, and you have a clean bill of health. Over the next three years your migraines grow increasingly worse. Soon, some of your cognitive functions decline. You go to see a new doctor, who orders a new MRI, and the scan shows a large mass that has been growing in your brain for the last four years. After a battery of tests, it is determined that the mass is benign, and you do not have cancer. You are somewhat relieved, but are still in pain, because the mass is causing your severe migraines, and it has caused irreparable damage to your sight and hearing. You find out that the initial scan done three years before clearly showed the growth, and the first doctor failed to diagnose it. You contact an attorney to sue the first doctor, but the attorney tells you that your statute of limitations has run out, because you only had two-and-a-half years from when the doctor failed to diagnose your tumor to file a lawsuit. You do some googling and come back to the attorney and ask, "What about Lavern's Law, the new law passed in 2018, which extended the statute of limitations to two-and-a-half years from the date you discover the injury?" The attorney tells you that unfortunately Lavern's Law only applies to malignant tumors and cancer. Because your tumor is benign and non-cancerous, you are unable to recover anything.
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