By Pat Murphy
The Daily Record Newswire
You just know that things are going to end badly when you give a guy a 12-pack of beer and a snowmobile. That they did for Donald Beebe.
Beebe lives in Branch County, Michigan. On August 26, 2004, Beebe was celebrating his 33rd birthday at home.
Apparently, Beebe is a natural multitasker, so while drinking beer and celebrating his birthday, he also did some work on his snowmobile.
After eight hours of beer and snowmobile maintenance, Beebe was ready for a test drive. Well, the snowmobile was ready, Beebe was not. Driving across his front lawn, Beebe grabbed a hold of the throttle and attempted to stand up.
Bad idea.
The snowmobile dumped Beebe and went on its merry way. Beebe found himself on the ground with a broken leg.
Off went Beebe to the Branch County Community Health Center where Dr. Richard J. Hartman Jr. diagnosed him with fractures to the tibia and fibula of his right leg. Hartman and Dr. Christina Sheely performed surgery to fix the leg, but the surgery allegedly did not go well.
Beebe suffered from intense post-surgical pain in his right leg, as well as numbness and swelling in his right foot, leaving him unable to engage in his normal activities.
Beebe sued Hartman and Sheely for malpractice, alleging that they negligently failed to diagnose and treat “deep compartment syndrome” in his leg. Beebe claims that he needed extensive reconstructive surgery to fix the condition.
The good doctors countered that Beebe’s lawsuit was barred by a Michigan law that precludes liability for personal injury when the plaintiff’s intoxication is “50 percent or more the cause of the accident or event that resulted in the death or injury.”
You see, blood tests taken after the snowmobile accident indicated that Beebe had a blood alcohol content of .13. Beebe himself admitted to drinking about eleven beers in the hours before his snowmobile misadventure.
Now, any first year law student can see the flaw in applying the intoxication defense to Beebe’s medical malpractice claim.
While Beebe’s intoxication may have had everything to do with his falling off the snowmobile, it had nothing to do with the professional judgments that Drs. Hartman and Sheely made in treating his broken leg.
But surprise, surprise! A Michigan trial judge bought the intoxication defense and dismissed Beebe’s lawsuit.
You just know that decision wasn’t going to stand, and it didn’t.
The Michigan Court of Appeals righted the wrong, finding that the doctors could be deemed the proximate cause of Beebe’s injuries despite his intoxication.
The court noted that there “was evidence that compartment syndrome can be a complication of fractures to the tibia and fibula and that plaintiff developed a deep compartment syndrome in his right leg after defendants performed surgery on the leg. There was also evidence that defendants did not diagnose or treat plaintiff’s compartment syndrome and that plaintiff suffered pain and clawing in the toes of his right foot as a result of the compartment syndrome.”
The court also explained that policy considerations precluded applying the statutory intoxication defense to Beebe’s medical malpractice claim.
“Although the [Michigan] Legislature’s purpose in enacting [the statute] was ‘to place more responsibility on intoxicated plaintiffs who are equally or more to blame for their injuries’ by ‘marking a shift toward personal responsibility[,]’this purpose is not served when a plaintiff, albeit an intoxicated plaintiff, is precluded from bringing an action to recover for separate and discrete injuries that were the result of medical malpractice, and not the plaintiff’s intoxication.
“Such an outcome results in an inequitable shifting of the blame that favors a negligent medical care provider who is more at fault for the injury than the intoxicated plaintiff,” the court said. (Beebe v. Hartman)
Yes, Beebe gets his day in court against Drs. Hartman and Sheely after all. And we can only hope that it has occurred to Beebe that it may not the best of ideas to mix beer drinking with snowmobiling.
