Two Women Have Unnecessary Mastectomies After Cancer Mistake

Two women have been left literally scarred after mistakes resulted in cancer misdiagnosis and unnecessary mastectomies.

One woman, speaking to the media under the pseudonym Rachel, shared her incredible story with ABC’s 7:30 recently to draw attention to the story, and to help other women avoid the same painful experience.

Aged 60, Rachel had moved to Darwin towards the end of 2012 to support her daughter-in-law and grand-kids while her son, a soldier, was on tour in Afghanistan. In July of the following year, a routine mammogram picked up something unusual, which was then biopsied and tested at Royal Darwin Hospital. Rachel said it was a senior surgeon who told her the tragic news: she had breast cancer and her entire left breast needed to be removed. The surgeon said the operation had to be done “urgently”.

“And it was performed rather quickly, within two weeks,” she said to the program.

Then, just a few weeks later, Rachel was called into the hospital to see that same surgeon.

“And that’s when he said to me: ‘I’ve got good news and bad news to tell you: the good news is you don’t have breast cancer. The bad news is you never did have breast cancer and we should never have taken your breast off’.”

An Unforgivable Error

It was then that Rachel began to realise just how shocking the error was.

“I started to really feel the impact of that, the horror of that mistake. How dare they make this mistake?” she said.

“I lost faith in the medical system in Darwin. In fact, after it happened to me, all the colleagues I worked with said, ‘Oh, don’t you know? You live in Darwin. The saying is: you feel the pain, book a plane. And this information came to me after, a little bit late.”

The team at 7:30 were able to confirm on the program that it was Professor John Skinner, a pathologist, who was responsible for the 2013 misdiagnosis. However, the hospital said that, even after identifying the error and it being reported, Professor Skinner continued to work at the hospital for another several months before his retirement. The only punishment were some restrictions on his practice.

Even more surprising is that Rachel wasn’t the only woman misdiagnosed by Professor Skinner who also went through the trauma of having her breast removed unnecessarily.

Another woman, aged 25 years old from Alice Springs, was breastfeeding when she went for a routine check-up before also being diagnosed, mistakenly, with breast cancer in 2013. She too had a mastectomy. According to 7:30 in the case of this woman Professor Skinner mistook natural changes caused by pregnancy for cancerous cells. While Rachel has been compensated by the hospital for an undisclosed sum, the young mother has yet to receive compensation for Professor Skinner’s obvious error.

The Hospital’s Response

Dr Charles Pain, the executive director of medical services at the organisation that oversees hospitals in the Northern Territory admitted that it was a “rather serious and tragic error”, but noted that both patients were notified as soon as the errors were realised. He put this mistake down the the imperfect nature of pathology, saying that the process at the hospital has changed as a result:

“Pathology unfortunately is an imprecise science. It’s really a matter of judgment as to what diagnosis you make. So that’s why we try and introduce “” and have done since then “” a double reading process so you actually get two pathologists looking at the same thing.”

A Word From Skinner

Professor Skinner, the pathologist behind the errors, did not want to be interviewed by 7:30, but he did say that he regretted his mistakes, and was “embarrassed and upset” about the two cases. He is now retired, but said he felt the system at the Royal Darwin Hospital were dysfunctional at the time, and in need of change.

An external review into the mistakes did recommend a number of changes at the hospital, all of which have been taken on board according to hospital spokespeople.

Still, Rachel is urging women to be cautious and to ask questions.

“Please ask questions, don’t assume, don’t trust,” she said. “This is your body. You have a right to be absolutely confident that the testing that’s being done within the health system at the moment is accurate.”