A Harlem woman is suing a Brooklyn doctor for testing her for HIV without her consent, and then informing her that she was positive for it. "I was tricked. I never signed any paper. It was a slap in the face," the 31-year-old woman, who wished to remain anonymous, told DNAInfo. Maybe there was some confusion for Dr. Pavel Yutsis of Lifex Medical Care—after all, the laws about consent were very, very different in the former Soviet Union.
The woman was recovering from recent gastric-bypass surgery when she went to Yutsis in the summer of 2011 for treatment of a Vitamin B12 deficiency. Yutsis suggested she take an HIV test after she continued to show a shortage of white blood cells and low levels of B12, but she refused: "I wasn't really concerned about anything else" other than recovering from surgery, she said. But a nurse tested her anyway, allegedly on orders from Yutsis, who informed her of the diagnosis: "My body got numb. I was not good after that," the woman said. "I was tricked with something I had no clue about."
New York's public health law requires written consent before someone can test for HIV, which the woman says she wasn't given: "She was never asked to sign a form consenting to the test and was not given counseling to prepare her for the administration of an HIV test," the lawsuit says. "These are personal choices that the law has specifically carved out to make the specific decision," the woman's lawyer, Daniel Pepitone, said. "We're all aware of the value of finding out, but she has her own reasons. We need to protect her rights under the law."
It sounds as though the woman still has little interest in discussing her diagnosis: "I'm working on things," she said, focusing instead on how much weight she lost from the gastric-bypass surgery. "I'm slim and trim and sexy," she said. "If I turn sideways, I'll be marked absent."
