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In a trial expected to last a month, a jury will decide exactly whom, if anyone, is to blame for her hardship resulting from the misdiagnosis.
An attorney for Kachurak and attorneys for the three defendants in the case gave their opening statements Tuesday in the Luzerne County Court of Common Pleas.
Each placed the blame for her ordeal on another party in the courtroom.
In a two-hour presentation, Kachurak’s lawyer, Matthew A. Cartwright, said the negligence of either Dr. Karen Cooper or Dr. Gazi Abdulhay, both cancer specialists, resulted in the mistreatment of Kachurak’s phantom cancer symptoms.
Cooper’s attorney blamed Abdulhay for overlooking a urine test result that would have proven Kachurak didn’t have cancer.
A lawyer for Abdulhay argued that a previous blood test showing the presence of cancer caused the misdiagnosis.
And an attorney for Abbott Laboratories, the manufacturer of the testing equipment that yielded the false positive in the blood test, said instructions packaged with its product clearly warned against using the product to diagnose cancer. The doctors were to blame, he argued.
In bits and pieces, all of the attorneys reviewed the complex biochemistry that led doctors to misdiagnose Kachurak with choriocarcinoma, a life-threatening reproductive cancer associated with the uterine wall.
Doctors detected high levels in Kachurak’s blood of hCG, a chemical produced only during pregnancy or because of certain types of cancer, in fall 2000.
She began chemotherapy, administered by Cooper, in September of that year. While the elevated levels of hCG sometimes dropped, the chemical never seemed to leave her system, even as her chemotherapy treatment became more aggressive.
In actuality, Kachurak probably never had any hCG in her system, Cartwright said. But rather, a rare protein in her body that interfered with the blood test doctors used to diagnose her cancer.
That fact wasn’t discovered until a urine test in February 2001 — which Kachurak insisted on after researching her symptoms on the Internet — showed no presence of the hCG chemical, Cartwright said.
But either Abdulhay or Cooper or both failed to properly review the test results, Cartwright argued.
Her chemotherapy continued until she obtained the test result for herself months later.
Cartwright described Kachurak’s 12 rounds of chemotherapy over seven months in late 2000 and early 2001, the despair she felt believing she would die, and the fear she still harbors because the chemotherapy she received increases the likelihood she could develop leukemia.
“This woman got chemotherapy for no reason,” Cartwright said.
Attorneys for Cooper and Abdulhay said that the doctors treated Kachurak to the best of their ability with the information they had and that the jury should not consider Kachurak’s suffering in rendering a decision.
“I ask that you not be sympathetic to the plaintiff,” said Dominick J. Georgetti, Cooper’s attorney. “I ask that you keep an open mind.”
Mike McGilvery, Abdulhay’s attorney, said the doctors took the safe approach in aggressively treating what appeared to be cancer.
“You can’t be wrong,” he said.
wmalcolm@citizensvoice.com
