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Christy v. Miulli2/18/2005
Plaintiff in wrongful death medical malpractice case appeals dismissal of her claims on statute-of-limitations grounds. AFFIRMED IN PART AND REVERSED IN PART; CASE REMANDED FOR FURTHER PROCEEDNGS.
Nearly three years after her husband's death, plaintiff, Joyce Christy, filed a wrongful death action against the physician who had performed a biopsy procedure on her husband a week before he died, the physician's employer, and the hospital where the procedure took place. The district court dismissed the plaintiff's suit on the defendants' summary judgment motions, ruling the statute of limitations barred the claims asserted by Christy. On appeal, the plaintiff contends the district court erroneously rejected her argument that the statute of limitations was tolled under the doctrine of fraudulent concealment. She also asserts the court applied the wrong statute of limitations to the loss-of-parental-consortium claims she brought on behalf of the decedent's minor children. Upon our review of the record and the controlling legal principles, we affirm the dismissal of the plaintiff's wrongful death claim and loss-of-spousal-consortium claim against the hospital, reverse the dismissal of these claims made against the physician and his employer, and reverse the trial court's dismissal of the children's loss-of-consortium claims as to all defendants.
I. Background Facts and Proceedings
The facts viewed most favorably to the plaintiff reveal the following events pertinent to our consideration of this appeal. See generally Cubit v. Mahaska County, 677 N.W.2d 777, 779 (Iowa 2004) (stating court, in considering summary judgment ruling, "'view the entire record in a light most favorable to the nonmoving party indulge in every legitimate inference that the evidence will bear' in favor of the nonmoving party" (citation omitted)). On September 21, 1998, the defendant, Daniel Miulli, D.O., performed a brain biopsy on the plaintiff's husband, Daniel Hocker, for a suspected brain tumor. The procedure took place at Mercy Hospital Medical Center, which is operated by the defendant, Catholic Health Initiatives Iowa, Corp. At some point during the operation, Hocker developed a brain hemorrhage and his condition worsened significantly. Nonetheless, Dr. Miulli would later state in the medical records that the procedure had been performed without complication. Post-operatively, Hocker was admitted to the intensive care unit of the hospital, where, after a series of additional complications, he died on September 28, 1998.
In the period immediately following the biopsy procedure, Dr. Miulli told Christy of the bleeding that had taken place, but wrongly represented to her that the hemorrhage occurred some distance away from the biopsy site. He suggested that perhaps an unrelated infectious process such as viral encephalitis caused the bleeding. (After this lawsuit was filed, Dr. Miulli conceded the cause of Hocker's death was Dr. Miulli's error in performing the biopsy in the wrong location, thereby causing the hemorrhage.) Dr. Miulli repeated his false report of what had occurred in the medical records, including recording a final diagnosis of viral encephalitis.
In the spring of 1999, the Mayo Clinic examined the decedent's brain and prepared a pathology report. This report, provided to Christy, confirmed the presence of a brain tumor but did not mention viral encephalitis. Christy testified in a deposition that the absence of any discussion of viral encephalitis in the Mayo Clinic report did not raise any questions in her mind because she did not know whether the examination conducted by that institution could have identified encephalitis in the brain tissue. Christy later discu
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