A woman suffering from an aggressive form of cancer is suing a New Jersey hospital for using a potentially dangerous device that she says spread cancer cells through her body during what was supposed to be a routine hysterectomy.

43 year-old Viviana Ruscitto was a patient at Valley Hospital, Ridgewood, NJ. She said a power morcellator was used to cut and shred tissue so it could be sucked out through a tiny opening during the minimally invasive operation.During the procedure, it spread cancer cells through her abdomen, according to The Record of Bergen County.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Newark, Ruscitto says a power morcellator should never have been used for her surgery at The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood last fall, noting that the federal government had already discouraged health-care professionals from using them because of the risk of spreading undetected cancer cells

 Ruscitto, who has been diagnosed with the rare cancer Stage 4 leiomyosarcoma, has sued the device maker, her doctors and Valley hospital, saying the metastases have spread quickly, obstructing her intestines and causing so much swelling she looks nine months pregnant.

The FBI announced recently that it is investigating the device, and the FDA issued a warning about the cancer risk in April 2014, saying morcellation could “significantly worsen...the patient’s likelihood of long-term survival.”

A judge in federal district court agreed last week to Ruscitto’s attorney’s request to take her testimony immediately in her room at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center because she may not live to attend the trial

 Ethicon, a division of Johnson & Johnson that made the devices, has advised doctors to stop using them and withdrew them from the market.

 Before that, about 60,000 such procedures were performed every year, and at least one of the affected patients has been interviewed by the FBI about her case

Ruscitto’s suit is the third filed in U.S. District Court for New Jersey involving cancer that was allegedly spread by a morcellator, and it is among nearly two dozen around the country.

Another case - Amy Reed, an anesthesiologist and mother of six, who underwent a hysterectomy with a morcellator at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 2013.

 Follow-up testing showed she had cancer that had spread through her abdomen

Prior research has shown that removing the uterus with a minimally invasive procedure known as morcellation carries a risk of spreading undetected cancer

Surgeons performing a hysterectomy with morcellation use a power cutter to slice uterine tissue into smaller fragments, and then remove those fragments through small incisions in the abdomen via a tube or laparoscope.

Prior research suggests that older woman who undergo morcellation are more likely to have underlying cancer

This should be a tremendous factor in physicians deciding whether it is appropriate to use that particular technique

In April 2014, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a safety alert, discouraging use of power morcellation for removal of the uterus or uterine fibroids (noncancerous growths that can cause bleeding between periods or pain) because of the cancer risk.

About 500,000 hysterectomies are done annually in the United States for such problems as uterine cancer and fibroids

With this procedure, you are breaking up the uterus; you are essentially cutting through a cancer (if it is present) and that could theoretically spread the cancer to outside the uterus

That risk is not present when the uterus is removed intact, as in a conventional hysterectomy