Last March FGT, a Murcian neighbor of Cabezo de Torreswent to AECC of Murcia have a mammogram after being called by the breast cancer screening program. Two months later, she called by phone to request the result, as it had not been communicated, and “in June it occurred to me that the result was negative”. However, she explains, a few weeks later she felt a prick in her chest and when she touched herself she noticed a lump. “At first I was calm because I had a recent mammogram in which they told me I had nothing, so I waited for an appointment I had made with my gynecologist a few days later and in the consultation I told him.”
Her gynecologist requested a mammogram and a chest ultrasound, “but since they didn’t call me for the appointment we decided go to a private doctor and find out».
Dr. Nieves diagnosed this patient a 2.5cm carcinoma and «he told us that it wasn’t recent, that it was already there when they had the previous mammogram, but that one they hadn’t seen it». The same thing that the oncologist who is visiting her at the Morales Meseguer hospital in Murcia, according to her husband, told her now.
I didn’t understand how that was possible that I had been diagnosed with cancer with a test so recent it came back negative. The world collapsed around me because only a few months before they told me it was negative and the tumor was already there”, says the affected woman.
While acknowledging that “the treatment in the Spanish Cancer Association it has always been very nice”, she does not understand what happened and fears that her same situation could be repeated in other women, “that they go away calmly after a negative cancer diagnosis and have the disease”.
FGT says the AECC itself has recognized that there are times when mammography isn’t enough a reliable diagnosis and see the breast well. “And they themselves have moved from the AECC to expedite testing in Morales.”
The patient has already been examined at the hospital in the Health Area VI and is waiting an operation to undergo a mastectomy in the next days. The husband points out that “even the surgeon recognized that if the test had been carried out in the hospital this error would not have occurred”, so they have already put the case in the hands of a health lawyer to consider whether to take legal action “for this misdiagnosis”.
