Florida Teacher’s Fall After His Leg Went to Sleep is Not Compensable

A Florida appellate court affirmed a state JCC’s denial of a claim filed by a teacher who sustained a broken left femur when he lost his balance and fell after his leg had “gone to sleep” while he had been sitting at his desk and he rose to assist a student [Silberberg v. Palm Beach Cnty. Sch. Bd., 2022 Fla. App. LEXIS 1078 (1st DCA, Feb. 16, 2022)]. Acknowledging that the injury clearly occurred in the course of the employment, the appellate court agreed with the JCC that the medical evidence established that the teacher’s leg falling asleep could have happened anywhere. Quoting Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, and applying the state’s major contributing cause standard, the court stressed that the teacher’s leg phenomenon could have been triggered at any time by normal, everyday movement outside work. The teacher, therefore, had failed to show that the risk that his leg would fall asleep arose from the employment.

Background

The teacher taught in a program for students expelled for their involvement in severe incidents at their home schools. The students stayed in one classroom all day, and they were allowed to leave for lunch and special elective classes. The teacher indicated that he typically walked around his classroom to help individual students, and he also used a whiteboard to teach. He said he did not spend much time sitting while the students were in the classroom, because they had to be constantly monitored.

On the day of the accident, before dismissing his class for lunch, the teacher took a seat in his usual chair at his usual desk to sit for five minutes or less. He described the chair as being similar to the rolling chair he was sitting in at his hearing before the JCC. There was nothing special or unusual about the desk. When he stood, he had no feeling in his left leg. His leg gave way, causing him to fall on the linoleum floor and break his left femur. The parties stipulated that the teacher did not trip or stumble immediately before the fall, and that he did not strike the desk or any other work equipment as part of the fall. No one assaulted him or pushed him.

IME’s Exam

A physician who performed an independent medical exam on behalf of the employer testified that the teacher reported occasional numbness in his left foot prior to the accident. Still, said the IME physician, the numbness that the teacher experienced when he fell at work “did not seem related to any major medical illness”; he did not have vascular disease, diabetes, sciatic nerve injury, or severe lower lumbar disc disease. The doctor concluded that the leg numbness that the teacher experienced while sitting just before the fall was “most likely due to brief compression of the nerves for the left leg due to the sitting in one position.” The doctor added that the teacher probably had a “benign condition,” that his leg could have fallen asleep at any time, whether at home or at work, and that it was likely to occur again.

The teacher’s IME physician reached essentially the same conclusion. This physician agreed that the teacher’s condition was very common, and that it could happen anywhere.

JCC’s Decision

The JCC found that the sitting and standing described by the teacher were “routine movements” to which the teacher would normally be exposed in his non employment life as well, so that the risk of the teacher’s leg going numb did not flow from his employment. Accordingly, the JCC denied the claim.

Appellate Court Affirms

On appeal, the teacher contended that there was no evidence that he had a “pre-existing condition” (i.e., that he suffered from any sort of idiopathic condition). He contended further that his injury was not the result of some personal risk, but that come from an unexpected or unusual event or result that happened suddenly.

The court offered some discussion of the “direct impact” sort of accident, e.g, when one stuck one’s finger with a stapler, and contrasted that type with the sort of accident that was caused by an idiopathic condition within the claimant. Quoting Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the court noted that in some instances the employee might be considered to “bring to the job some personal element of risk unrelated to the employment. In such cases, Florida courts required the use of an “increased hazard” test (a test that predated the “major contributing cause” test).

The court continued that under that increased hazard test, without an added industry risk, the accident or injury as a practical matter will not have arisen out of work, but instead out of the idiopathic condition—with prompting from a normal, anywhere-type of activity that happened to have been performed at work. In this situation, there would be no work causation to support compensability. The court continued:

We cannot overstate the point here that, outside the context of a comfort-break accident, it is the presence of an idiopathic condition that triggers the “increased hazard” test, not the commonplaceness of the work activity or condition that caused the fall [Opinion p. 21-22].

Major Contributing Cause

The increased hazard test had to be coordinated, however, with the requirement in Florida that the teacher’s work must be the major contributing cause of the teacher’s fall. Here, the court said the JCC had properly assessed whether the teacher’s work could be the preponderant cause by considering the nature of his sitting and whether it required more than the normal exertion associated with sitting in non-work life.

The court stressed that the evidence before the JCC established that the teacher’s sitting before the fall was normal, was for a normal amount of time, was in a normal chair, and ended in a typical way without the teacher abruptly leaping to his feet. There was nothing unusual about the floor that facilitated the fall. For the JCC, then, while there was evidence that the teacher’s sitting at work was in the chain of causation leading to his fall, the teacher did not establish that his sitting for work, under the circumstances, was anything more than an incidental trigger of the teacher’s idiopathic response. The same sitting outside of work was just as likely to be that trigger, which meant that the sitting was not the preponderant cause, or MCC, of the teacher’s fall.