 |
 |
to fill out a simple form to connect to Personal Injury Lawyers in your area.
|
|
|
|
|
United States Steel Corp. v. McBrayer3/4/2005
ace injury. The trial court erred as to that aspect of its TTD award.
The employer also argues that TTD benefits should not have been awarded with respect to a three-week period in January 2001 during which the employee complained of back pain. The employee was diagnosed with a contusion and strain of his lumbosacral spine on January 9, 2001, by Dr. Timothy A. Cool, who attributed those symptoms to a fall resulting from an ice storm that occurred in early January 2001; the employee was held out of work by Dr. Cool as a result of those conditions until January 30, 2001. In a pretrial stipulation, the employee indicated that he sought workers' compensation benefits for no conditions other than a claimed injury to his neck and a claimed loss of short-term memory incident to his December 30, 2000, workplace accident, thus waiving any claim that the back injury reported to Dr. Cool was work related. Under the circumstances, we agree with the employer that the rule recognized in Cooper controls and that the employee is not entitled to TTD benefits with respect to that period from January 9, 2001, through January 30, 2001, when the employee was principally recuperating from his back injury. The trial court's award of TTD benefits for that period, then, is also erroneous.
We now turn to the employer's final remaining contention: whether the employee is entitled to TTD benefits for that portion of the recovery period after March 25, 2002, the date upon which the employee was released by Dr. Berchuck to return to work. The trial court instead awarded TTD benefits through May 3, 2002, the date upon which Dr. Berchuck determined the employee to have reached maximum medical improvement with respect to his cervical-disk herniation.
It is frequently said, as a gloss upon the nature of TTD relief under the Act, that "the 'time of temporary total disability' is the recovery period that lasts until maximum medical recovery is reached." Haywood v. Russell Corp., 611 So. 2d 365, 367 (Ala. Civ. App. 1992). As a general matter, that statement is correct -- an employee who has been injured will frequently need to fully recover, in the medical sense, in order to perform all of the functions of his or her employment; thus, we need not, as the employer suggests, overrule cases such as Haywood that indicate the importance of the employee's date of maximum medical improvement in determining the closing date of TTD benefits. Indeed, given that the Supreme Court has expressly approved of the Haywood gloss (see Ex parte Moncrief, 627 So. 2d 385, 387-88 (Ala. 1993)), we are bound, under § 12-3-16, Ala. Code 1975, to adhere to it.
However, drawing an analogy from the "full-time employment" cases we have discussed above, we can easily envision a significant exception to the general rule: it may be possible for certain injured employees to be able to return to work full-time and to be able to earn the same wages as they did before their injuries without having exhausted all of the measures that modern medical science may employ to facilitate healing. Because the Legislature has mandated in the second sentence of § 25-5-57(a)(1) that TTD benefits be paid "during the time of the disability" (emphasis added), it follows that in the rare case where an employee is able to return to full-time work and is able to earn his or her preinjury wages without having reached maximum medical improvement, § 25-5-57(a)(1) would require that TTD benefits be terminated regardless of whether further medical improvement may occur. In other words, the Act implicitly recognizes that an injured employee may sometimes cease to have a compensable temporary total disability under the Act before the healing process ends.
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 Alabama Personal Injury Attorneys
Personal Injury Lawyers
|
| |
to fill out a simple form to connect to Personal Injury Lawyers in your area.
|
|