Shine OnWoman undergoes seven months of chemotherapy for cancer she never had
Imagine being diagnosed with a terminal illness, spending seven months being treated, giving away your belongings and arranging for home care -- only to be told a couple years later that you were wrongly diagnosed and that your suffering was all in vain.
"Like a mourning process - mourning for myself," explains Texas resident Herlinda Garcia, 54, who was incorrectly diagnosed with Stage IV terminal breast cancer in 2009. "I just lost my dad three years before, and I felt like I was mourning for my family."
She recalls her physical and mental health deteriorating after going through eight sessions of chemotherapy over seven months. She fell into a dark depression and experienced anxiety, reports the Houston Chronicle.
Also see: Inspirational YouTube star dies from cancer at 13
“Everything was swollen. I lost my eyebrows, my eyelashes,” Garcia, a part-time state government worker and mother of four, tells ABC. “It’s really hard. I can’t explain how I felt. It’s like I was in a dream.”
She was recently awarded $367,500 in damages in a medical malpractice lawsuit against her oncologist, Dr. Ahmad I. Qadri, who passed away this March. The money will be taken from the doctor's estate.
"I don't hate [Dr. Qadri] but I feel that because the patient trusts the doctor, they need to take that extra effort to read things a little closer so a mistake like this isn't made," says Garcia.
In 2009, she underwent a mastectomy to remove a benign tumour from her left breast. But in a follow-up appointment one month later she was incorrectly diagnosed with terminal cancer by Dr. Qadri who misread her PET/CT scan thinking she had enlarged lymph nodes.
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It wasn't until 2011 when she was being treated for anxiety that a different doctor at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center noticed the error due to scans that were performed.
"When I first heard the news, I was happy because I was blessed … my faith is very strong," says Garcia. "At the same time, I was angry because all this damage had been done."
As for medical malpractice cases in Canada, they are just as harmful to the victims, resulting in between 38,000 and 43,000 deaths each year, according to the book After the Error: Speaking Out About Patient Safety to Save Lives.
The authors claim that out of more than 4,000 lawsuits filed against Canadian doctors from 2005 to 2010, only 2 per cent resulted in trial verdicts for the victim.
