Eastern Shore Public Service Co. v. Young

³⁴¹ Hammond, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. The trial judge, sitting without a jury, allowed the employee, Young, workmen’s compensation, reversing the Accident Commission which had found that no claim for compensation had been filed within a year of disability; and the employer and insurer appeal. On April 6, 1953, Young first felt the back and leg pains-which led to a disk operation in August 1954 and to his claim for compensation, filed in October 1954. In the course of his-work for an electric light company, he was walking in a circle on uneven ground pushing a long bar inserted in a ground anchor, when he felt a kink in his back and pain across his belt line, radiating down his left leg.

He continued working until quitting time that day. The next day he picked up a box of bolts from a truck and again suffered the pain in his back across his belt line and down his leg, and dropped the box. His description was that “it jerked me.” That night he went to a doctor near his home, who said he had pulled a muscle and prescribed heat treatments and sleeping on the floor instead of in bed. He was away from work five days and during that period saw the doctor another time.

In the year following, he had trouble with his back and leg from, time to time. The pain was always the same. On April 6, 1954, a bolt cutter fell and struck him, apparently on the shoulder, although once Young said it had hit him on the back. There was no evidence whatever of any physical consequences of this happening or of any causal connection between it and any pain or disability.

For some three weeks prior to-August 2nd, Young had been suffering from the pains in his back and leg. On the morning of August 2nd, he felt no pain,, he said, until he climbed a pole to help string wires; then, as he pulled up a buckarm, he noticed the pain across his back and down his leg, but continued to work. At lunch time he went to his local doctor who told him that he probably had a ruptured disk. This diagnosis proved to be correct and a week or so later he was operated on by a specialist at Johns-Hopkins Hospital.

After his recovery, he returned to work for the same employer. Not until several months after the operation did Young file his claim for disability. Both the ³⁴² local doctor and the specialist who performed the operation felt that he probably had protruded a disk at the time he first felt back and leg pain in April 1953. Young’s explanation of why he did not sooner file a claim for compensation was that he thought the pain would go away.

It may well be that the onset of pain on April 6, 1953, was not the result of an accidental injury and that the dropping of the box of bolts on the next day was more the result than the cause of the pain and weakness in his back. However, if it be assumed that Young did suffer an accidental injury on either the 6th or 7th of April, 1953, it is undisputed that he did not file a claim within a year of those dates. Code, 1951, Art. 101, Sec. 38, which was in effect and controlling at the time of the