Unnecessary mastectomies trigger lawsuit
Written by on February 22nd, 2012 in Latest News.
St. John’s lawyer Ches Crosbie wants access to medical records for the patients he represents. (CBC)
Nine women are suing Newfoundland and Labrador’s largest health authority because their breasts were removed by mistake following inaccurate cancer tests.
“I had a double mastectomy done which I shouldn’t have had done,” said Myrtle Lewis, who lives in Roddickton on Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula.
She learned six years ago that the double mastectomy she had undergone in 1999 — after she was told she had cancer in both breasts — had been unnecessary.
She said her doctor told her testing mistakes had missed that she had had just pre-cancerous cells.
“The excellent news, he said, is you’re not going to die of breast cancer because you didn’t have it,” Lewis, who also underwent six months of chemotherapy, told CBC News.
Lewis and eight other women whose breasts were unnecessarily removed because of flawed testing have so far received no compensation.
St. John’s lawyer Ches Crosbie, who has filed a lawsuit against Eastern Health, said the authority is refusing to send the women’s medical records to an expert for an examination.
“It does make one wonder whether Eastern Health has truly learned some of the lessons of the Cameron inquiry and of the class action and of the whole scandal,” said Crosbie, referring to a judicial inquiry that examined how hundreds of women had been given botched results for hormone receptor tests. Crosbie led a class action suit that resulted in a $17.5-million settlement in 2010.
Eastern Health, which oversees much of the cancer treatment in Newfoundland and Labrador, is not commenting on the complaints.
“They [said] they’re worried they’re going to be hurt,” Lewis said. “But they wasn’t too concerned about the hurt that was done to us.”
With files from Doug Greer
