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.
Specifically, he was refusing to feed from her right breast.
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.
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.
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."
Even worse, scans revealed that the chemo was having almost no effect. The cyst had barely shrunk by a millimeter.
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.
Naturally, this made it terrifying when they were suddenly called to come in ten days before that appointment.
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.
The family was devastated and both Sarah and her husband have been diagnosed with anxiety since the incident.
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.
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
