Trial unraveling woman's misdiagnosis
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He said he thinks about it every day: How she trusted him. How the odds of her survival grew worse no matter what he did. How he had a daughter the same age. And finally: How he, a nationally prominent University of Washington gynecological oncologist, came to make the misdiagnosis of his career.
"If I would have known what Abbott (Laboratories) would have known, we would never have gone through all this," Hisham Tamimi told a King County Superior Court jury yesterday.
Tamimi is a key witness in a lawsuit that attorneys for Jennifer Rufer filed against Abbott and the University of Washington Medical Center.
Tamimi was originally named in the lawsuit but has been dropped and has joined the medical center in filing a counterclaim for damages against Abbott.
Abbott, in the meantime, pins the blame for the lawsuit on Tamimi and the UW and what the company calls medical malpractice, not on the false readings for cancer it acknowledges the product can give in some cases.
The tests given Rufer, of Spanaway, were among those that give false readings.
Attorneys for Abbott say that the UW physicians who treated Rufer should have known the tests could give false positives.
Her ordeal began in January 1998 when she sought help for irregular bleeding and was given the Abbott Laboratories Axym BHCG pregnancy test.
The test showed a high-level of the hormone HCG, a reading typical of pregnant women or those who have a gestational trophoblastic tumor.
In the absence of a fetus, Rufer's doctors feared she had cancer.
The test was repeated 44 times, and each time her HCG level was elevated.
"If left alone untreated, it's going to spread ... it was a major disaster," Tamimi testified.
Usually, the disease spreads to the lungs, then the brain, and the patient is "doomed to death."
Rufer was 22 and had no children, and she had wanted a large family. But after chemotherapy failed, she underwent a hysterectomy, Tamimi testified.
Less than a week after her surgery, her hormone rate was still high, and pathologists found no sign of a tumor in Rufer's uterine tissue.
"We were hoping for something we could localize and remove," Tamimi said.
"Most of the time you see it, but not always."
Tamimi ordered more chemotherapy and a full-body scan, which turned up suspicious spots on her lungs. Tamimi believed it was a sign that the cancer had spread.
A portion of a lung was removed. The Abbott test was repeated, and the hormone was still high.
That December, Rufer and her husband, David Rufer, sat in front of their Christmas tree with their dog, Bronco, for a photo, expecting it would be their last Christmas together.
Then, a short time later, they received a call from the medical center. Results from a different test kit and a review of Jennifer Rufer's blood samples by doctors at Yale University had led doctors to conclude that she likely never had cancer and that the Abbott test had given false readings in some women.
Rufer was angry and devastated over the unnecessary loss of her reproductive organs, a grief she said she carries today.
Tamimi was stunned as well.
"I was devastated," he told the jurors.
The trial before Judge William Downing is in its fifth week and is expected to go to the jury in mid-June.
Nancy Bartley can be reached at 206-464-8522 or nbartley@seattletimes.com.