The High Court awarded Anna Fogarty €121,386.11 after finding that injuries to her right elbow and shoulder were caused by a 2011 collision at the Limerick Institute of Technology campus in Thurles, Co Tipperary.
Mr Justice Barr found that Michael Cox’s car reversed into the right side of Ms Fogarty’s car on 25 November 2011. Liability for the collision had been admitted. The main issue at trial was whether it caused her injuries.
The judge accepted Ms Fogarty’s evidence that her right hand was on the steering wheel horn and her elbow was sticking out when the impact made it strike the car door. He accepted that she had complained to doctors in the days after the crash, although those complaints were not recorded in the medical notes until 11 January 2012, about seven weeks later. He said the defendant could have called the doctors to contradict her account.
The defence argued that her tennis elbow was a degenerative condition unrelated to the crash, and that repeated steroid injections may have caused the damage later seen in scans and during surgery. Its expert, hand and plastic surgeon Mr Riordan, considered the elbow symptoms unrelated to the collision and attributed the joint damage to injections. The plaintiff’s treating doctor, Dr Sean McCarthy, and orthopaedic surgeon Mr Mahalingam gave evidence supporting a traumatic cause.
The judge preferred the evidence of Dr McCarthy and Mr Mahalingam. He found, on the balance of probabilities, that the elbow epicondylitis resulted from the crash. He also accepted that Ms Fogarty sustained a shoulder injury. The shoulder symptoms later largely resolved following physiotherapy, while elbow pain persisted despite significant improvement after arthroscopy in February 2015.
The judge was not satisfied that the injections caused the damage shown on the MRI scan. He said the defence had not pleaded that inappropriate treatment by the doctors broke the chain of causation, and that the evidence did not establish negligent treatment in any event. He found no fault with Dr McCarthy’s repeated injections, which Mr Mahalingam said were standard treatment, and did not criticise Ms Fogarty for following her doctors’ advice.
The court awarded €85,000 for pain and suffering to date, €30,000 for future pain and suffering, and €6,386.11 in special damages, making a total of €121,386.11. The judgment records that €1,000 of the special damages claim for travel expenses had been agreed.