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.

If this sounds like a horror story to you, we assure you it is not. This in fact is a very real scenario, that our law firm has played out several times over the past few years. This is the current state of the law in New York, and it must change.