Dying woman sues her New Jersey doctors for using a hysterectomy device

A 43-year-old New Jersey mother is lying on her death bed, her body racked with cancer a year after she underwent a hysterectomy, and she’s blaming her doctor for using a controversial device in the procedure.

Viviana Ruscitto is suing her oncologist, Dr. Howard Jones, for malpractice, alleging he used a device that she blames for spreading cancer cells in her uterus throughout her internal organs.

“My sister’s prognosis is poor, and I do not know how much longer she can continue fighting this cancer,” Mirian Riviera told a judge last week in a sworn statement.

Ruscitto had a minimally invasive hysterectomy performed in October 2014 to remove a large fibroid in her uterus at The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, N.J.,The Record reported.

Jones used a controversial surgical tool, a power morcellator, to cut and tear tissue so it could be removed from her body.

The device was approved to remove uterine fibroids in 1991 because the small incisions from morcellation helped patients recover quicker and easier.

The device has come under heavy scrutiny in recent years, however, and in April 2014 the FDA released a safety alert against morcellators, acknowledging that the device can spread undetected cancer cells.

The agency said some of the minced undetected cancerous tissue fragments could be left behind in the abdominal cavity and spread to other parts of the body.

The government discouraged doctors from using the morcellators and encouraged professionals to discuss the risks and benefits with their patients.

The device’s largest manufacturer, Ethicon, a division of Johnson & Johnson, promptly pulled the morcellator off the market.

Despite these warnings, Jones allegedly continued using the tool and did not perform a pre-operative biopsy on Ruscitto or discuss the risks with her, the suit said.

“We will not be commenting on this matter,” Maureen Curran Kleinman, a spokesman for The Valley Hospital where Jones and her gynecologist Dr. Eugenia C. Kuo work., said.

Her lawyer, Demetrios Stratis, argued that the healthcare providers should have informed her, and obtained her consent, before using the morcellator.

“She specifically told (the doctor) that she had tremendous anxiety of ovarian cancer,” the lawsuit said.

Weeks after the procedure, Ruscitto was diagnosed with incurable Stage 4 leiomyosarcoma weeks later.

“If those procedures are going to be done, they have to be carefully screened,” Dr. Mark Morgan, director of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania Division of Gynecologic Oncology at Pennsylvania Hospital, told the Daily News. “There can’t be anything suspicious about it. If anything is out of the usual, it shouldn’t be done.”

Ruscitto is suing her doctors, the hospital and device maker Karl Storz Endoscopy.

The FDA recently reassessed and increased the risk of undetected aggressive cancer cells in women undergoing a hysterectomy for fibroids from one in 500 to one in 352, The New York Times reported.

But sarcoma cells are tricky to detect in a biopsy, doctors say, and that could make it hard for Ruscitto to pin blame on the doctor’s use of a power morcellator.

“Even if you don’t see them spread, about 50% of them will recur anyway before you took the uterus out,” Morgan said. “It may have spread already, so that being said, you may not be making it worse by morcellating it.”

This is the third suit filed in New Jersey and one of two dozen filed in the country involving cancer spread by morcellation.

“With the FDA warnings, with the companies that stopped making them, I think I would in general not advise doing (morcellation),” Morgan said.

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