For many people, cancer ranks way up there in terms of terrifying health diagnoses.
While medicine has made great strides in treatment, there are still many forms of cancer that are still incredibly difficult to treat or practically impossible. Even the treatments that are effective can be debilitating, dangerous, and result in severe changes to your quality of life going forward.
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After giving birth, 25-year-old new mom Sarah Boyle was having trouble breastfeeding her baby Teddy.
Specifically , he was refusing to feed from her right breast.
Sarah had seen doctors previously about a lump in that breast, but it had never shown signs of being cancerous.
It had grown harder since her pregnancy and upon seeing her doctor again, he referred her to Royal Stoke University Hospital.
They decided that it warranted a biopsy.
The results came back and Sarah was told that she had cancer.
It was a fairly rare form of aggressive, triple-negative breast cancer and Sarah would need to undergo 16 rounds of chemotherapy before consulting with the surgeon again about next steps.
That amount of chemo had a high chance of affecting her future chances for more children.
Not only that, but she considered it four months of torture.
As she told The Daily Mail , “I was exhausted, constantly sick and had horrible ulcers and blurred vision.”
She had to stop breastfeeding and could barely hold Teddy. She missed his first birthday party because she was so ill.
Even worse, scans revealed that the chemo was having almost no effect. The cyst had barely shrunk by a millimeter.
After the chemo was over, the surgeon decided that the best course of action would be a double mastectomy.
Not wanting to miss out on a future with her husband and baby, Sarah agreed immediately and underwent the five-hour surgery in May 2017.
While she recovered, her family waited on pins and needles for her next follow-up appointment, when they would learn if it had been enough to beat the disease.
Naturally, this made it terrifying when they were suddenly called to come in ten days before that appointment.
So when Sarah’s family came in, they expected the worst.
However, they were then told that the surgeon had found no signs of cancer anywhere in the breast tissue he had removed from Sarah.
In fact, Sarah had never had cancer at all.
An investigation was launched and it turned out that her biopsy had been recorded incorrectly.
The family was devastated and both Sarah and her husband have been diagnosed with anxiety since the incident.
One of their biggest concerns is that Sarah’s unneeded treatment could cause future health risks.
In particular, since these events, the type of breast implants used in Sarah’s reconstructive surgery have been linked with another rare form of cancer.
There was one positive outcome: Sarah was able to have a second child, who they named Louis.
The hospital has admitted to their mistake and legal proceedings are on-going to compensate the family for the grief and trauma. New precautions have also been instituted to ensure such a mistake won’t happen again.
h/t: Daily Mail , The Telegraph
