Couple recounts hepatitis C diagnosis, treatment
Bonnie Brunson will never forget how she felt when she got the diagnosis.
Devastated, of course. But also bewildered and ashamed.
“This was a disease … for those who injected drugs or had multiple sex partners,” the 70-year-old said Friday in District Court. “I had never lived that lifestyle. Ever.”
Bonnie and her husband of nearly 50 years, Carl Brunson, testified about how their lives were upended and changed forever the day she learned, in 2005, that she had contracted hepatitis C.
“It was like … jumping off the Grand Canyon,” Carl Brunson, 72, said.
Their emotional testimony was part of a civil trial stemming from the medical practices of Dipak Desai, the doctor at the center of the local hepatitis C outbreak.
The Brunsons and another longtime Las Vegas woman, Helen Meyer, are suing Health Plan of Nevada, alleging the company should have known about Desai’s shoddy medical practices and removed him from its network of physicians.
Attorneys for the company, meanwhile, depicted the money-saving practices used by Desai, now stripped of his medical license and facing criminal charges, as carefully concealed from outsiders.
Both Meyer and Brunson contracted hepatitis C after being treated in 2005 at the now-closed Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada controlled by Desai.
Brunson made a full recovery and Meyer a partial one. Meyer testified earlier this week.
Bonnie began feeling ill not long after a colonoscopy she received in June 2005 at the center. Her migraines were more severe, and she was tired all the time.
“That just wasn’t me,” she said. “I felt that something was wrong.”
After being diagnosed, she began a difficult yearlong treatment program that included giving herself weekly shots and taking pills that caused hair loss, insomnia, severe pain and nausea. She lost about 20 pounds from her 112-pound frame. She withdrew from the family business and her friends. She lost the intimacy she once had with Carl.
“I just felt that I needed to separate myself from him because there was just no way that I wanted to take a chance of passing it on” to him, she said.
Watching her suffer destroyed Carl.
“To hear your partner crying out in so much pain, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it … is the worst feeling in the world,” he said.
All along, the mystery remained: how had she contracted the disease?
“I was obsessed with that,” she said.
The answer came not long after she completed her treatment, while she was out-of-state visiting a newborn grandchild. On television, she saw a news report about the hepatitis C outbreak in Nevada, with a picture of the Endoscopy Center.
“A light went off,” Bonnie said. “I truly believed in that instant, that was the answer to my question. I was happy to find closure … but then that emotion changed to anger and ‘How could this happen? Why did it happen?’ ”
The Brunsons testified the printing business they ran at the time also suffered because of the stigma that came along with her diagnosis.
“There was a financial hardship there,” Bonnie said.
The defense will start presenting its side Tuesday. The trial, which began Feb. 20, is expected to last at least a couple more weeks.
During his opening statement last month, Robert Eglet, an attorney for the Brunsons, went back more than two decades in recounting Desai’s career as a gastroenterologist to depict a long-running pattern of shoddy medical practices.
That should have alerted Health Plan of Nevada, the state’s largest medical insurer and a subsidiary of UnitedHealthcare, to remove him from its network of physicians, Eglet said.
Health Plan of Nevada joined in the condemnation of Desai’s practices and offered sympathies to those who suffered as a result. But attorneys for the company said it had no reason to suspect a problem until a Southern Nevada Health District investigation in early 2008 pointed to the reuse of anesthetic vials as the culprit behind a major local outbreak of hepatitis C.
Which version the 12 jurors accept will be pivotal in deciding whether Meyer and the Brunsons should win damages from Health Plan of Nevada because of the way it monitored physicians.
The criminal trial for Desai, 63, and nurse anesthetist Ronald Lakeman, 65, is slated to start April 22 in District Court.
The other nurse charged in the case, Keith Mathahs, 76, pleaded guilty in December and agreed to testify against the other two defendants.
On Thursday, District Judge Valerie Adair ordered an independent medical evaluation of Desai to verify he had a stroke late last month and determine the extent of brain damage.
She also ordered both sides to continue preparing for the April trial.
Contact Lynnette Curtis at Lynnette.Curtis@yahoo.com.
