Every time she accidentally nicks herself in the kitchen, every time her daughter falls and needs help, she thinks about her disease.
When she’s at a restaurant, she inspects the silverware. When she takes her child to a pediatrician, she watches the doctor take the needle out of the package.
A distrust, a wariness, hangs over the 41-year-old mother’s life.
She is one of the 10 people diagnosed with hepatitis C linked to a former surgical technician at Rose Medical Center. The technician is accused of stealing syringes of the painkiller Fentanyl and replacing them with her used syringes containing saline.
The otherwise healthy woman went in for kidney stone surgery in February. She asked The Denver Post not to disclose her name to protect her and her family’s privacy in the community and at her workplace. The Post reached her through malpractice lawyer Jim Leventhal.
It was unusual for her to go to the hospital to begin with. She tried a lot of natural ways to alleviate the painful kidney stone last winter, and doctors determined the best treatment was a simple laser surgery.
It was easy for her. No complications.
But about six weeks later, she couldn’t shake a flulike feeling. She thought she was just working too much or had some lingering case of bronchitis. She was tired. Her urine was dark. She often canceled plans just to go to sleep.
She went to an urgent-care clinic, where a doctor took one look at her and sent her to the emergency room. She was yellowed with jaundice.
“It scared . . . me,” she said. “I’m a healthy person. I’d never been to the ER before, and in two months, I’d been there twice.”
When she got the diagnosis, she sobbed to a friend on the phone.
“She said go get more tests, don’t go to the Internet. The Internet will scare you.”
In a battery of doctor appointments and tests and endless questions, they figured out she didn’t have any risk factors for hepatitis C, except for the surgery at Rose.
She walked around angry. She told her friends and family about the Rose surgery, about how that would be the only way she could have gotten the blood-borne disease.
“They always said, ‘Oh, no, it can’t be Rose. There’s no way. Everything’s disposable,’ ” she said. “In my heart of hearts I knew, but there was no way of proving it.”
Battling illness, people’s disdain
The problem with the kind of hepatitis C she contracted, called “acute hepatitis,” is that a patient has to wait five weeks for doctors to determine what to do. Sometimes the body fights it and sometimes it doesn’t.
“I had five weeks of waiting and wondering: Do I have six months of interferon treatments? Am I going to have to adjust my life to have that happen?” she said. “Is my family OK?”
After two months, and great news that her body was fighting the hepatitis on its own, she began to relax.
She has adjusted her lifestyle, eating better and avoiding alcohol completely.
There is still a stigma, though.
“The disdain people look at you with; how could you get such a disease?” she said. “People will always know I had hepatitis C, without the explanation. I just happened to have a kidney stone and I happened to have had it treated.”
Someone from Rose Medical Center called her to see how she was doing and said they were sorry.
“They didn’t say, ‘What can we do for you, and what do you need?’ ” she said.
She never thought she’d be able to put a face to her illness. She never believed anyone would pay for what happened to her. She has tried not to get wrapped up in the scare this week; she already has had that exhausting time.
But seeing surgical technician Kristen Diane Parker’s face flared her anger again.
“Here’s the face and a name who could have infected me,” she said. “And while I want to just blame her, there’s a hospital, there’s a whole system that broke down.”
Allison Sherry: 303-954-1377 or asherry@denverpost.com
