‘Absolutely unimaginable’: N.S. woman says she was falsely diagnosed with cancer

A Nova Scotia woman says she was falsely diagnosed with cancer at a Halifax hospital.

Gabriella Patey says she and her family are traumatized after she was falsely diagnosed with cancer by a Halifax hospital.

The 31-year-old claims it all started on May 17, when she says she had just finished celebrating after her doctor informed her that results from the IWK, a women’s health centre, showed a tumour in her breast was “completely benign.”

“We celebrated as my mother had just died of the same cancer a year-and-a-half prior. So, it was a huge relief,” says Patey.

But the celebration was short-lived, as Patey says she received a shocking call from her doctor less than a month later.

“I get a call from my primary care physician that the IWK had made a mistake, and I actually did have metastatic carcinoma, which is a very grim diagnosis,” says Patey.

Just as quickly as she got that call, Patey says she went into “survival mode” and began making calls of her own.

“I told my friends, my family, my work,” says Patey. “I put claims in through my bank so my bills would be taken care of. And I got my primary physician that put my name on the list for medically assisted dying.

“My number one priority was to make sure my husband was taken care of. And making sure he didn’t have to watch me suffer, like I had to watch my mother suffer,” she says.

But things took a turn when Patey says she received another phone call from her doctor last Friday. She says her doctor informed her there had been a mix up at the IWK and that she did not have cancer.

Patey says she received a second opinion on Monday, with her doctor confirming she was indeed cancer free.

“This morning, I received a phone call from my primary care physician, the director of pathology at the IWK did a full investigation. She actually went and looked through all the slides and all the reporting herself and determined that my file had been mixed up with someone else’s. So now my thought is (that) there’s this poor woman that’s walking around that was given hope that she didn’t have breast cancer. And she does. And she has one of the most aggressive breast cancer out there,” says Patey.

Andrea Slaney, a spokesperson for the IWK, told CTV News Atlantic in an email Monday that, “due to patient privacy, IWK Health is unable to comment on specific cases. However, concerns of this nature are taken seriously and a formal investigation process is followed with engagement from IWK’s Quality, Patient Safety and Patient Experience team.”

Patey says she does not know what to believe and her faith in the province’s health-care system is lost.

“We haven’t been able to sleep. We’ve been crying ourselves to sleep every night. And now I have to go to my work, my family, and say, ‘Actually, I don’t have this terminal diagnosis.’” And the shame that I feel for having to do that, even though it’s not my fault,” says Patey.

“Our health-care system is broken. We know that it’s been broken for some time, but it seems like if something like this can happen, are we broken beyond repair?”

Patey says throughout this process, she was never once contacted by the IWK directly. She says she intends on taking legal action.

“I’m a person, I’m a human being. I’m not a number in a computer system and to not even call and say, ‘We are so sorry for what has happened here.’ It’s just absolutely unimaginable to me,” says Patey.

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