CANCER MISDIAGNOSIS
Big award for woman treated mistakenly for cancer.
Mistakes can occur in medicine as in any profession. Indeed, they are sometimes regarded as learning tools. Mistakes can be made anywhere on a patient’s journey even at the early diagnosis stage. A recent High Court case underlined how badly things can go for a patient who is treated with the wrong medication and follow up chemotherapy but whose real condition was left unattended.
A young woman presented to the Bon Secours hospital in Cork 2005 with severe stomach pain. She was misdiagnosed with T cell Lymphona cancer while, in fact, she had a much more benign self-limiting condition called Kikuchi disease which was not a cancer condition at all. Her senior counsel said the two diagnoses were “at the opposite ends of the spectrum.”
As the woman was diagnosed, wrongly it emerged, with a serious cancer condition, she was required to undergo a number of tests, X-rays, scans, and biopsies to include chemotherapy sessions which are unusually debilitating, and she suffered from stress, anxiety, and considerable upset as a result. Clearly, as she was being treated for a serious cancer condition, she was in fear of losing her life even though she was a teenager at the time of treatment.
During her stay in hospital, which amounted to seven months at one stage, she had to take thirty-two tablets on one particular day and endure six courses of chemotherapy treatment.
She was advised, over a year later in December 2006, that she never actually had any cancer condition but suffered from a totally unrelated virus. She had missed out on her leaving certificate course during her stay in the cancer ward and that had compromised her career prospects apart from causing her much unnecessary anxiety and stress.
She sued her consultant histopathologist, Eoin O’ Murchu, and the Bon Secours Hospital in Cork. She was awarded €1.9 million in court for damages and while the case was settled without an admission of liability, her family were with her to hear the consultant’s apology read out in open court.
Aoife O’ Donovan v Eoin O’ Murchu & Bon Secours Hospital [2023] 13 December 2023 Irish Times.