Fired NYU Langone hospitalist says the hospital called her time-limited leave requests indefinite

Two statements in NYU Langone's correspondence sit at the centre of the complaint. On March 6, two days before the hospital's cut-off, the physician wrote: "I have repeatedly asked NYU Langone HR and administrators for the opportunity to discuss reasonable accommodations and have received no response" ^[12][17]. The reply, as quoted in the complaint, said: "Our records do not reflect recent communication from you regarding a request to engage about a workplace accommodation" ^[13]. It also described her requests as "indefinite" ^[13]. The complaint alleges that description was false because she had repeatedly submitted medical notes with specific return dates ^[18].

The word indefinite has a fair reading from the department's side. A return date that keeps slipping can look open-ended to the people covering the shifts, and the dates in this record did slip. She could not return on the scheduled November 10 date and sent HR updated medical documentation ^[7]. Her doctor then sent an accommodation letter in February 2026, which her supervisor met with immediate skepticism, the complaint alleges ^[9]. By the March 8 cut-off, 207 days had passed since the birth ^[15]. The letters the complaint quotes, though, based the refusal on cost. "Please understand that your absence impacts service to our patients and places a burden on other staff members," the February 27 letter said, before stating that "we are unable to accommodate your current leave extension beyond 3/8/2026" ^[11][14].

That cost is real, and the complaint itself supplies the evidence for it. The filing alleges that while she was on leave her supervisor phoned her again and again, urging her to come back and citing how much work flu season had put on the division ^[8]. She had held the full-time job for about six weeks when she gave birth ^[16]. A hospitalist division missing a new full-time doctor through flu season fills the gap with other staff, the burden the February 27 letter named ^[11]. Against that sat a leave with stated end dates, by the complaint's account, and the two sides disagree over whether she ever asked to discuss an accommodation ^[18][12][13].

The sequence of the February letters shows how the decision was timed. On February 17, a senior administrator wrote that she had exhausted her six-month disability leave benefit "due to birth of a child" and warned that "a leave extension will be burdensome for the department and will only be granted if reasonable" ^[10]. In my view, the end of that benefit set the timing of everything after it. Ten days later the hospital refused the extension and said she could be released if she could not return on March 9 ^[14][11]. Her March 6 request to discuss accommodations, by her account the latest of several, came after that refusal ^[12].

The claims are allegations in a complaint filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York on October 7, and the published account of it does not include a response from NYU Langone ^[1]. If her medical notes carry the return dates the complaint describes, the hospital is left defending the burden argument in its February letters ^[10][11].