Docs Gave My Husband a Cancerous Kidney Transplant: Wife

A New York City woman says doctors killed her husband by transplanting a cancerous kidney.

After waiting five years for an organ to become available, Vincent Liew, 37, got the transplant in February 2002. He died seven months later.

His wife, Kimberly Liew, says an autopsy confirmed Liew was killed by the donor's uterine cancer. Liew also said her husband was in excruciating pain after the operation and wanted the organ out of his body. A lawsuit trial was scheduled to start Tuesday in Queens.

NYU Medical Center declined to comment.

It filed its own lawsuit claiming St. Luke's Cornwall Hospital in Newburgh failed to properly screen the kidney from the upstate donor. But St. Luke's successfully argued that confidentiality laws prohibited it from turning over her medical records.

The United Network for Organ Sharing says it would be exceedingly rare for a donated organ to give someone cancer. The upstate donor had uterine cancer, but since Liew didn't have a uterus, doctors maintained the chances were less than 1 percent that he would develop the cancer, according to the Daily News.