Editor’s Note: For the purpose of privacy, the student source in this story asked that her last name be withheld.

When Rachel, a senior at the University, got a phone call from her dermatologist’s office on a Thursday afternoon, she was not expecting them to tell her that her routine pregnancy tests from McKinley Health Center had come back “weakly positive.”

Rachel’s dermatologist had recently started her on a five-month regimen of Accutane, an intense prescription acne medication that requires female users to take two monthly pregnancy tests in order to ensure the woman is not pregnant. Among other side effects, the drug can cause severe life-threatening birth defects in babies conceived while taking it.

Her doctor at Christie Clinic advised her to immediately stop taking the Accutane and ordered that she get a second, more sensitive blood test to more accurately determine if she was pregnant or not.

Apprehensive about the ambiguous results, Rachel spoke to doctors at McKinley who then drew her blood to run quantitative tests for beta human chorionic gonadotropin, or the “pregnancy hormone.”

It was impossible that she could be pregnant, she thought. Along with the monthly pregnancy tests, Rachel had to sign a pledge saying she would use two forms of birth control before her dermatologist would even prescribe her the powerful acne medication. Plus, she had just finished a normal period the previous Sunday.

Despite all her reassuring thoughts, though, the test results had come back “weakly positive.”

In the past 18 months, there have been a total of six “weakly positive” pregnancy tests from McKinley. In all six cases, including Rachel’s, the tests were falsely positive and none of the patients were actually pregnant.

“It is like telling someone that somebody died. You feel the shock, and you feel the pain, and you feel the hurt. If you came back and said, ‘Oh they didn’t die,’ it doesn’t go away instantly,” Rachel said. “You still thought about it, you still considered all of the alternatives and you still imagined your life that way.”

Better known as hCG, the “pregnancy hormone” is released by a growing fetus and can be detected in a woman’s urine or blood. The hormone triggers a reaction in pregnancy tests that turns the test paper strips different colors.

In the case of McKinley’s tests, a positive pregnancy test will yield two bright red bands. The first red band is the control strip that shows whether or not the test is valid, and the presence of a second band shows that the patient has high levels of the hCG hormone and is very likely to be pregnant.

In Rachel’s test results, the first band was bright red, showing the test had worked, but the second band was “barely red”, according to David Lawrance, medical director at McKinley. This small change of color in the test strips is what doctors at McKinley had classified as “weakly positive.”

“It’s technically correct, but we don’t like the term because we think it’s misleading,” Lawrance said.

The first test was a qualitative hCG test, which merely detects whether or not the hormone is present, whereas a second, quantitative test can measure exact levels of the hormone in the blood or urine.

Because the original test was not ordered through McKinley, they forwarded the lab results to Rachel’s dermatologist without automatically running the blood samples through quantitative testing.

Gina Bird, a physician’s assistant at Christie Clinic’s dermatology department, said her office treats positive pregnancy results in patients who are using Accutane very seriously.

“Before we will prescribe her (Accutane), she needs to take a pregnancy test that day, and come back in a month (and take another test) to confirm she’s not pregnant,” Bird said. “Even if she’s not sexually active and swears by it, we still give pregnancy tests.”

After waiting for hours for the second test’s results, Rachel finally received a phone call from McKinley confirming that she was not pregnant. But even after the initial relief washed over her, she was left with lingering anxiety from the scare.

“The whole scare was only 24 hours, but after I went home, and after I had already found out it was negative, I couldn’t watch T.V., I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t read. There was nothing that could hold my attention, and if I just went and lay in bed it was like having a nightmare while I was awake.”

Lawrance said doctors at McKinley are still puzzled as to what would have caused the test to react, if not the hCG hormone. Lawrance has been in the profession for 30 years, and he said Rachel’s case was the first “weakly positive” case he had ever heard of.

“It’s a very bad term to use. Technically it’s weakly positive — there’s a positive response — but if you interpret it as pregnancy, that would be a false positive. But nevertheless there was a reaction on the paper,” Lawrance said. “It probably wasn’t any hormone. It was probably some other substance that caused a bit of a reaction. There can be other interfering substances that won’t ever give as strong of a response but will give a response.”

Lawrance said that McKinley was in the process of undergoing a root cause analysis to modify procedures and educate staff on the chance that the false positive test results happen again. He said in the future, McKinley laboratory technicians will always automatically perform the second quantitative test regardless of whether the original test was ordered by McKinley or an outside doctor.

“This is kind of a hurtful thing here for us that we would hurt somebody that only came for help. I want everyone on campus to have great faith in us (and know) that we do take our work seriously,” Lawrance said. “Some things are really important and you don’t ever want them to happen again. I don’t want us to do a test and somebody leaves and gets the mistaken impression that they’re pregnant. If we ever do anything wrong, we’re desperate to fix it.”