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windchymes -> RE: Breasts removed by.. MISTAKE (10/4/2007 1:19:39 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: cyberdude611
And with a diagnosis like that, they should have sent a sample to more than one lab. The error would have been found quite quickly had they done that. She may have got a second opinion but did they take a 2nd sample? The problem is that the lab mislabeled the sample. So the lab could retest it 100 times and still come back as the same result.
Actually, this is only half true. The main specimen is labelled by the nurse assisting the doctor who takes the specimen, also called a biopsy. It's labelled at the bedside or in the operating room and then is sent to the lab. It's after it arrives at the lab and goes through a complicated procedure to prepare it for review by the pathologist that the mis-labelling would have happened. Many times in a pathology lab, specimens are assigned numbers chronologically, rather than names, THAT is where the mislabelling probably happened.
If they had asked for a re-test to confirm that diagnosis, the lab would have gone back to the original specimen, which was labelled by the attending nurse and it would have been tested alone and given another number, and the correct results would most likely have been obtained and the mistake discovered. That's the biggest reason re-testing is done when receiving a diagnosis of "highly invasive cancer" is to verify that diagnosis by running the test again, and I'm really surprised a second biopsy wasn't done, I would certainly insist on one.
Not that that excuses it, it's a horrible mistake.
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