## Facts

- Leonard J. Weems slipped and fell on a wet floor while shopping at a Drug Town store in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, owned by Hy-Vee Food Stores, Inc.
- Weems experienced lower-back pain after the fall.
- Approximately eighteen months later, Weems sought orthopedic care for persistent back pain and received an epidural steroid injection (epidural block).
- After the injection, Weems developed an infection that led to spinal meningitis; he later recovered.
- Leonard and Vicki L. Weems sued Hy-Vee for damages from the fall, including damages associated with meningitis and Vicki’s loss of consortium.
- A jury found Hy-Vee 60% at fault and awarded damages across multiple categories, including medical expenses, pain and suffering, loss of body function, lost earnings, and consortium.

## Issues

1. Whether the trial court erred by refusing to instruct the jury on superseding cause based on the later medical treatment and ensuing meningitis.
2. Whether the harmful effects of medical treatment administered eighteen months after the fall were so extraordinary or unforeseeable that they broke proximate causation and relieved Hy-Vee of liability for meningitis-related damages.

## Decision

- The Iowa Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment for the Weemses.
- The court held the trial court properly refused Hy-Vee’s requested superseding-cause instruction.
- The court concluded the later medical treatment and resulting complications did not constitute a superseding cause on this record.

## Legal Principles

- Proximate cause in tort includes a substantial-factor component and a foreseeability component.
- An intervening act relieves an original tortfeasor of liability only when it constitutes a superseding cause—an event sufficiently extraordinary, in relation to the risk created by the original negligence, to break the causal chain.
- Medical treatment reasonably pursued for injuries caused by a defendant’s negligence, and complications arising from that treatment, are generally treated as foreseeable consequences rather than superseding causes.
- A superseding-cause jury instruction is properly refused when the evidence does not provide a basis for a reasonable jury to find the intervening event was superseding.

## Conclusion

The appellate court affirmed the verdict because complications from medical treatment sought for Weems’s fall-related back pain—including infection and spinal meningitis—were within the foreseeable scope of harm and did not warrant a superseding-cause instruction that would have allowed Hy-Vee to avoid liability for those damages.


Weems v. Hy-Vee Food Stores, Inc., 526 N.W.2d 571 (Iowa Ct. App. 1994)