The company has spent billions on cases about one of its most popular
products. As its executives try a brazen new legal strategy to stop the
litigation, corporate America takes note.
God
gives you only one body, Deane Berg always said, so you’d better take
care of the one you’ve got. A physician assistant at the veterans’
hospital in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, she knew that spotting between
periods wasn’t unusual for a forty-nine-year-old woman, but she went to
the doctor anyway. Her two daughters had already lost their father to
lung cancer, so Berg wanted to stick around.
Just
perimenopause, the doctor concluded after a cursory examination.
Probably a blood clot, the nurse practitioner told her when a subsequent
ultrasound showed something on an ovary. “It’s not going to be cancer,”
the gynecological surgeon said before removing both ovaries on the day
after Christmas in 2006. But, when Berg went for her follow-up, she read
the words on the pathology report before the surgeon had a chance to
break the news: serous carcinoma. She cried, and the surgeon did, too.
She would now need a full hysterectomy, chemotherapy, and a great deal
of luck. Every year, around twenty thousand women are given a diagnosis
of ovarian cancer in the United States, and more than half that many
will die of the disease. (...)
