A Doctor’s Deception

The labour and delivery nurses were suspicious. Five pregnant women, all in rapid labour, arrived at the North York General Hospital triage on the same day—a Saturday in May 2016. The deliveries were happening fast—too fast—and because it was the weekend, the nurses were short-handed. One patient, at term in her first pregnancy, was fully dilated just an hour after being admitted and gave birth 25 minutes later. Another arrived suffering from uterine hyperstimulation—when contractions come too frequently or last too long, a serious complication of being induced. As a result, her baby’s heart rate was slowing ominously, and the staff had to deliver it via emergency C-section.

But the patients all said they hadn’t been induced, and their charts showed no indication of induction, either. What those five women had in common was their doctor: Paul Shuen, a highly respected ob-gyn and gynaecological oncologist. The nurses figured it must have had something to do with him. Staff wrote up a formal report of the incident and passed it up the chain of command.

A month later, another of Shuen’s patients arrived at the hospital from his clinic, again on a Saturday and again in rapid labour. This time, a nurse named Lindsay Bruer performed a vaginal exam on the woman and found the remnants of a little white pill. There was no mention of it on her chart. Whatever this pill was, it had been given to Shuen’s patient without her knowledge or consent, and it had sent her into a violent labour. Bruer pulled off her latex glove, with the pill on the tip of its finger, turned it inside out and threw it in the trash. She went to the nursing station and told her colleague Karen Yu. This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened: similar pills had been found in Shuen’s patients twice before, in 2013 and 2015. Together, the nurses decided that Bruer should retrieve her glove from the garbage and put it in a specimen bag. They were going to test it and find out what it was.

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