Dr. Michael Kamrava is the one facing a Medical Board
of California this week that could revoke or suspend the Beverly Hills fertility specialist's license to practice medicine, but it seems as if La Habra's Nadya Suleman is on trial in Los Angeles as well.
Today's bombshell: Octomom's medical records
show Kamrava consulted with her on several occasions about the
dangers of bearing multiple babies.
That's the contention of Kamrava's lawyer, who would note the medical problems experienced after the January 2009 birth of only the second full set of live octuplets in the United
States and, beginning a week later, the longest-surviving octuplets in the world.
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However, expert witness Dr. Victor Fujimoto, director of the UC San Francisco In Vitro Fertilization Program, told the medical board Kamrava's scribbled notes are
indecipherable and it's unclear what advice he gave the mother of six before she birthed eight more children.
The latest allegation comes a day after the medical board proceedings began with the disclosure from Fujimoto's testimony that revealed Octomom lied in an interview in January when she said she did not have any frozen embryos left.
In fact, Fujimoto testified Monday, Kamrava implanted 12 embryos in Suleman before she birthed the octuplets and that the 35-year-old Cal State Fullerton graduate still has 29 frozen embryos stored.
“I cannot imagine any colleague of mine transferring that many embryos,” Fujimoto reportedly told the board.
Suleman has a history of bad accounting when it comes to frozen embryos. She said a year before the octuplets were born that she had six left over from her previous in-vitro fertilization treatments. She said she requested that all of the remaining embryos be implanted, despite the norm for a woman her age have two or three implanted at the most. (In his testimony, Fujimoto said no more than three is the national fertility standard.)
Octomom has said part of her reasoning for attempting a sixth pregnancy was so that the frozen embryos would not be destroyed, and she claimed the six remaining embryos were implanted and two split into twins, resulting in a total of eight embryos.
Fujimoto's testimony reveals that was a lie, and Kamrava has previously stated that Suleman insisted on “fresh” cycles of embryos.
Kamrava has also said that when five fetuses were evident a month after the embryos were implanted, he offered Suleman the option of selective reduction. She declined, according to the doctor.
The advice, lack of mental health screening and number of implanted embryos Kamrava provided Suleman and another patient–neither of whom is identified by name in the proceedings because of doctor-patient confidentiality–form the crux of the case against the physician, who claimed in a July Nightline appearance that his treatment of Octomom was “done the right way.”
Previous Weekly coverage of Nadya Suleman and Michael Kamrava: ocweekly.com
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.