Missed Diagnosis

Scott Woodard is resubmitting his complaint--but this time his letter will be more concise and medically explicit. "I just want to make sure this time around I do it with proper help," he says.

Having lost two battles with the board, Janet Laurel has now turned her attention to other struggles. In her pink-walled office, where she sips a cup of warm water to quell a persistent cough, she points to the pin on her dress--the figure of an angel, sculpted from Spanish moss and Hawaiian iauhala grass, and sold for $15 each to raise funds for a nonprofit organization she's founded to explore the common medical and environmental history of all breast cancer survivors. Laurel named her group the "Cherubim Foundation" after the second order of angels, known as the "seekers of knowledge"; once she's recruited boardmembers, she hopes to survey 100,000 breast cancer survivors through the mail and on the Internet and hire a statistician to sift through the findings.

In May, Laurel flew to Ireland for a prescription for Anvirsel, an anti-viral drug made from the oleander shrub that's used for breast cancer patients by some Irish doctors but has yet to be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Since then she has been put on an FDA "compassionate use list" to continue taking Anvirsel while enrolled in a Montana doctor's study. But she recently learned that she may still have to resort to more chemotherapy after all.

She summons her energy from a deep spirituality, from wishes for a cancer cure for the sake of her eleven-year-old niece--and from sheer will. "Statistically, I should have been dead a long time ago," she says. "There's something I'm doing that's working."

Laurel insists that she didn't want her ob/gyn to lose her medical license. "I have really only wanted two things in regard to this lawsuit," she wrote to the board after it initially dismissed her case. "First, that Dr. Kimbrough be more careful, caring and diligent when she is faced with another woman with...a possible diagnosis of breast cancer. Secondly, a display of sympathy, empathy, compassion or an apology."

Visit www.westword.com to read related Westword stories.