If You Took the Depo-Provera Shot — and You've Been Diagnosed With a Brain Tumor — There Is Something Pfizer Hoped You Would Never Find Out

Story One — Two Women

On an unremarkable Tuesday afternoon in the spring of 2005, two twenty-two-year-old women walked into the same family planning clinic in the same Texas town, on the same day, for the same reason.

They did not know each other.

If you had been sitting in the waiting room that afternoon, you would not have been able to tell them apart. They were the same age. They had grown up in the same town. They were both starting their first real jobs that fall. They both wanted, eventually, to have children. They both wanted, not eventually, a reliable form of birth control they did not have to think about.

They were each given the same information by clinicians working from the same printed pamphlet, recommending — among the available options — a relatively new injection called Depo-Provera.

Neither of them was told anything at all about brain tumors. Because in 2005, even the medical literature on the question was years away.

One of those young women — let us call her Jennifer — said yes to the shot.

The other — let us call her Christine — said no. Not because she had any particular reason to be cautious. Just because.

That was the only difference between them.

Jennifer kept getting the shot. Every three months. From 2005, when she was twenty-two, all the way until 2024, when she was forty-one. Roughly seventy-six injections.

Christine took the pill, on and off, for most of those same nineteen years.

Last winter, Jennifer had a craniotomy. The surgeon removed a meningioma the size of a golf ball from the back of her skull. She lost some of her vision. She lost some of the words she had known her whole life. Her oldest daughter has started doing the grocery shopping on Saturdays because Jennifer gets confused at the deli counter.

Last winter, Christine took her family to Colorado for a long weekend of skiing. She is forty-three years old. She is fine.

There is, as far as anyone can tell, no medical reason — no genetic difference, no environmental difference, no lifestyle difference — for the difference between what happened to Jennifer and what happened to Christine.

Are you Jennifer? Or are you Christine?

The free book — Silent Tumor — opens with the longer version of this story. Then it tells the story of a real woman named Anita Petersen — and what happened to her on the morning of October 5, 2024.

And Then — Anita

Her name was Anita Petersen. She was forty-seven years old. She lived in Texas.

On the morning of Saturday, October 5, 2024, Anita's family had a ten o'clock Zoom call scheduled. The kind of call families do on weekends. Anita did not log on. Her family tried calling her. There was no answer.

By late morning, her family was worried enough to ask for someone to check on her.

The person who opened the door found that Anita had died in her sleep, sometime shortly after midnight.

She was forty-seven years old.

The autopsy revealed something Anita had no idea was inside her skull: an intracranial meningioma — a brain tumor — in the back of her brain. It had grown silently. It had bled. The bleeding killed her.

Anita had been getting the Depo-Provera birth control shot quarterly since 2006. She had received roughly seventy injections over eighteen years.

She did not know — and her doctor did not know — that the manufacturer of that shot had been on notice since at least 2010 of a possible link between the drug she was being injected with and the type of tumor that killed her.

In March of 2024, the British Medical Journal published a study reporting that women who used Depo-Provera for more than one year had a 5.6 times higher risk of developing exactly the kind of brain tumor that killed Anita.

Anita died seven months after that study was published. We do not know whether she ever heard about it.

On July 1, 2025 — nine months after her death — Anita's sister Leigh Petersen filed a wrongful death lawsuit on Anita's behalf in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida, where the federal Depo-Provera cases have now been consolidated.

Leigh Petersen is now Anita's voice in the courtroom.

I want you to read Anita's full story. I want you to read it before you go to bed tonight. I want you to read it before the next woman like Anita goes to sleep in a house her family will be unable to wake her from.

That is why I wrote Silent Tumor. That is why I want to mail you a free copy.