PrimeTime: Misdiagnosis of Cancer

April 21 -- Diagnosed with cancer at 22, Jennifer Rufer underwent debilitating chemotherapy and a hysterectomy.

"I can't have kids," she says, "and I desperately want to have a family."

Compounding the physical and emotional pain that haunts her every day, doctors have discovered Rufer never had cancer at all.

Rufer has brought a lawsuit against Abbott Laboratories, one of the world's largest diagnostic and pharmaceutical companies, claiming that flawed results from their Axsym BHCG pregnancy test led to unnecessary cancer treatments, including chemotherapy and a hysterectomy. Rufer is also suing her doctor, the hospital and its lab. The hospital and Abbott are also suing each other.

High HCG Level

Three years ago, soon after Rufer was married, she went to the doctor because of irregular bleeding. The doctor took a blood sample for the Axsym BHCG routine pregnancy test, one of the most common blood pregnancy tests in the country.

The test results came back positive, showing Rufer was pregnant. But her doctor could find no baby. Additional Axsym pregnancy tests came back positive for Rufer, and still, there was no indication of a pregancy.

When a woman is pregnant, she produces high levels of a hormone called beta human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG). But if there is no baby, the elevated HCG levels can be a sign of a rare form of cancer called a gestational trophoblastic tumor. If untreated, it can spread rapidly and kill. If treated early with chemotherapy, it is highly curable. In fact, early treatment is so important that doctors sometimes order chemotherapy even if there is no evidence of a tumor.

Rufer was referred to a cancer specialist at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle for more extensive tests. Though scans showed no sign of a tumor, her HCG level continued to be alarmingly high. Doctors diagnosed her with cancer, and she began chemotherapy immediately.

"I looked like a completely different person," says Rufer. "I was grey in color … I had a lot of people call me sir because they thought I was a man … I was sick all the time."