Lorraine Bonner felt as though she was the only one. The surgical staples used to seal her colon after surgery had leaked, she has alleged in a lawsuit, spurring additional surgeries and a long, difficult recovery.
And then, just over a year after the ordeal, she read a Kaiser Health News investigation that described worse cases. KHN revealed that the Food and Drug Administration had allowed stapler maker Covidien to quietly file tens of thousands of reports of stapler malfunctions into a then-hidden database.
