This poor woman’s body has been MUTILATED because of a fucking laboratory error. Why the hell isn’t it SOP to do more than one biopsy? Why didn’t they check for any change in the spot one month after the biopsy, prior to the fucking mastectomies?
Well I hope you give her the best fucking drugs, reconstruction and breast implants that money can afford - I don’t think anyone could ever reimburse me for that sort of trauma. I would NEVER be able to trust a doctor again.
IANADoaLT, but reading this infuriated me. This should not be able to happen. You would think that if this was such an ‘aggressive’ form of cancer it would be EASY to check and see how far it had progressed - but doesn’t look like they did that. Fucking Christ beating them over the HEAD with a crutch.
I think that the woman whose extremely aggressive cancer went untreated for months has taken a much greater blow.
Onthe other hand, mistakes are gonna happen. That dosen’t mean that we should treat them casually or not attempt 100% perfection, but good, smart, qualified people doing their absolute best will still make the occasional mistake, and sometimes enough mistakes will happen in sequance that the best safeguards will fail. It really, really, sucks that this is true, but it is.
I agree that yes, the other woman is definately in a worse position - however it does not seem as if there was more than one screwup - merely that a single pair of biopsies were switched. Gah! Of course, the media might not be telling the whole story, god forbid.
And KneadToKnow, good point. If ever anyone tells me I’m dying , I’m going to tell them I’m going to ask someone else before I take their word for it
I’m still really disgusted by this. It could be worse, she could have had a limb amputated - but still. Gah!
There was an article in the paper a few days ago about people getting stuff left in them after surgery, like sponges and scissors. They estimated 1500 of those a year, extrapolating from 54 cases.
The article said that the average payout to patients was more than $50000. Seems like good incentive to make sure it doesn’t happen, but I guess it’s not common enough.
Second opinions are good, but expensive.
TMI Sidenote: The article also mentioned where the items were left. 22% were left in the vagina. I know that the upper parts aren’t terribly sensitive, but wouldn’t you notice? It’s not exactly a huge area.
I am dedicating my name to Ass-dom with this, but here goes. When I read that article, the thing that caught my attention most was that it was in the twin city. if you don’t get it i don’t care, but seriously…what’s next then…will she get silicon ones, or can they reattach the breasts like they would a finger?
The first rule of posting on the Straight Dope Message Board is “Don’t be a jerk.” RandomLogick, I’ve noticed that the few posts you’ve made have been pretty jerklike. If you wish to continue posting on this message board, I advise you to take more care in your phrasing.
If I were wearing my feminist “damned patriarchy is oppressing me” hat, I’d say that it’s not so much that it’s not noticed, but that the complaints of women regarding their pain or problems during recovery after gynecological (as well as other) procedures is often dismissed or downplayed by physicians. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence out there on this issue, you can have fun with Google on the topic.
RandomLogick, to answer your question - they likely had to dissect the amputated breasts to examine them for tumors. There wouldn’t be much chance of reattaching them. If you wish, you can read up on breast reconstruction surgery - the ones I have read of mention taking a flap of skin and muscle from the abdomen and surgially fashioning a nipple to be attached to it - of course, it will not have the same ‘feel’ as a natural breast, I imagine, but this isn’t something normally related in the things I have read. I also would think that reconstruction in addition to implants would be the way to give a woman’s normal breast size back.
you know, I wrote a reply to you people, but then when I tried to log in i messed up my password, so here goes again, from what I remember:
Wow, that’s disgusting. I’m not really one of those people who watch TLC (The Learning Channel, not the group) when they have the doctor shows on with all the blood and surgery and baby-making. My question was generally: what happens next? Perhaps I didn’t word it the best way, but I didn’t think that the BBQ Pit was a place for eloquence and Shakespearean dialogue. I’m really not such a jerk, and doggone it, people like me…sort of. and Lynn, it was just a question, but if you were referring to my retarted attempt at an “adult” joke, im sorry because it was insensitive in the context, and perhaps out of it, too.
WAG: Most insurance doesn’t pay for a second biopsy, probably. I’m not an oncologist or familiar with that field, so I have no idea if/how they can tell otherwise what’s cancerous and what isn’t. I don’t know if just eyeballing the area works.
RandomLogick: No, breasts can’t be reattached like a finger - maybe if they’d put it back immediately something could be done, but you can’t really get biopsy results back that quickly. She’d have to undergo some kind of reconstruction.
As a lab tech myself in a lab where we do tests for cancer, I’d like to don the asbestos underwear and attempt to defend the putative fuckwits, or dickwads, or whatever.
My lab, like all such labs, have extremely extensive procedures in place to make sure mistakes like this don’t happen, and for the most part they work very very well. Just to give you an idea, the lab I work in processes rougly 3,000-5,000 patient samples a month - roughly 50,000 a year. In 2002, we detected less than 15 mistakes, and almost all of those were minor - things like the wrong doctor’s name getting attached to the result. Now I realize and acknowledge that if you’re one of those 15, it’s a horrible experience - that’s why we go to so much trouble to make sure it doesn’t happen. But frankly, I think 15 out of 50,000 is pretty darned good.
I also realize that your rant is directed primarily at the doctors who didn’t order a followup test, and as far as I’m concerned, go for it! We curse them out all the time when they send us a chunk of tissue the size of a pinhead and expect us to get enough usable DNA out of it to run five different tests. I just had to speak up for my compatriots in the lab.
