‘Absolutely unimaginable': N.S woman says she was falsely diagnosed with cancer
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.
Gabriella Patey
Gabriella Patey says she was falsely diagnosed with cancer. (Source: Vanessa Wright/CTV News Atlantic)
For more Nova Scotia news, visit our dedicated provincial page
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CTV News
41 minutes ago
- CTV News
Ontario's measles outbreak through the eyes of front-line workers
Emergency department charge nurse David Lambie outside the emergency entrance of the Woodstock General Hospital in Woodstock, Ont., Thursday, May 22, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nicole Osborne ST. THOMAS — Health-care workers battling measles in southern Ontario say they think about the outbreak from the moment they wake until the moment they sleep. They say treating and tamping down the surge of a disease most have never seen in their lifetime is constant. Some have even been infected by patients who unwittingly spread the highly infectious illness while seeking help for early but general symptoms — fevers and coughs are common before the telltale rash appears days later. Measles has spread to more than 3,000 people in Canada this year. More than 2,000 of those infected are in Ontario. Here's a look at caregivers on the front lines of an outbreak that has particularly struck a region south and east of London. 'The unlucky ones' Carly Simpson considers herself one of the 'unlucky ones.' Five days after developing a sore throat, body aches and fever, the nurse practitioner gazed at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, stunned to see red splotches all over her body. 'Oh my gosh this is measles,' Simpson gasped. She said measles never crossed her mind when she first fell ill mid-March, suspecting a more likely cause was her autoimmune disease, ankylosing spondylitis, which leads to chronic pain and inflammation. After all, the vast majority of cases had been among the unvaccinated and Simpson said she had been inoculated three times — including a booster in 2015 after a test revealed her previous two shots didn't lend full immunity. Simpson said she had been assured at the beginning of the outbreak that three shots would be enough to protect her. She still got sick and was essentially bedridden for days, only mustering enough energy to walk to the bathroom. But she said the rash only lasted a day and never spread to her husband or kids. 'I had a mild case because I've been vaccinated,' said Simpson, among five per cent of the outbreak's cases to involve vaccinated people. She suspected she was infected by a patient who came to her clinic with virus symptoms a couple of weeks earlier. Early symptoms can seem like other illnesses until the rash appears, leaving health-care workers who examine them vulnerable to exposure. 'Is this just a common cold? Is it just some viral infection?' she said of the questions that dog caregivers. Shawn Cowley was unlucky, too. He noticed white spots inside his cheeks in late April, and then a red blotchy rash on his forehead that migrated down his face, and onto his shoulders and arms. 'Fortunately for me, because I was fully vaccinated I didn't get the full brunt of measles,' he said, explaining that the rash otherwise would have covered his whole body. Still, it took about a week for his body to recover from the exhaustion. Cowley is a key player in measles containment as head of emergency management and preparedness at the local health unit, Southwestern Public Health. His case was traced to his son's hockey tournament. He eventually told his colleagues that he contracted measles but noted there is 'a stigma' associated with the illness. Cowley also felt guilty for going to the grocery store and filling up on gas before he was symptomatic, potentially spreading it to others. 'When you find out you do potentially have measles, and the number of people I've exposed, understanding how virulent measles is, that's a really hard thing to deal with personally because you put other people at risk.' 'Slow burn' Dr. Erica Van Daalen calls the outbreak a 'slow burn' but one that has required close collaboration among local hospitals to safely treat and isolate measles patients. The chief of staff at St. Thomas Elgin General Hospital said she might see one to three patients in the emergency department on an average day, and often they are children. As of late May, three infected pregnant women had delivered babies and 15 kids had been admitted. Those include young patients transferred from hospitals in Woodstock and Tillsonburg, which don't have pediatric units. 'It's a lot of one-on-one bedside nursing,' Van Daalen said in an interview earlier this spring. 'When the days are busy, it wears on the nurses.' Less than seven per cent of Ontario's cases have ended up in hospital. But the logistics of safely admitting a measles patient is like expert-level Tetris. Masked patients are ushered through back doors to negative pressure rooms that keep contaminated air from escaping into other areas of the hospital and infecting more people. The room is sealed and has a system that filters and exchanges the air. Exposure risks are avoided as much as possible, even trips to the bathroom, said Sangavi Thangeswaran, a registered nurse and an infection control practitioner at both Alexandra Hospital Ingersoll and Tillsonburg District Memorial Hospital. 'We ask the patient to stay in there. If they need anything like using the washroom, we try to give them commodes or urinals, just to lessen the exposures,' Thangeswaran said. There are five negative pressure rooms at Woodstock Hospital. When they're full, patients are assessed in the ambulance garage, said David Lambie, a charge nurse in Woodstock's emergency department. It is an extra layer of logistics to navigate, said Lambie, whose hospital has cared for 108 measles patients since January, 55 of them kids. Once a patient is well enough for discharge, their negative pressure room is left empty for half-an-hour while contaminated air is expunged. Then it's deep cleaned for the next patient, said Thangeswaran. She said each of her Oxford County hospitals initially had just one negative pressure room in each emergency department but as cases swelled they created three more. As of June 12, her team had cared for 14 measles patients in Ingersoll and 64 in Tillsonburg. 'Inherent challenge' Van Daalen, of the hospital in St. Thomas, said deciding whether to discharge a kid sick with measles sometimes keeps her up at night. 'You hesitate to send them home because you're not quite sure how they're going to land,' she said. 'There are some later-term consequences for kids who have measles. It's a very rare complication, but we'll have to keep our surveillance up.' Dr. Ninh Tran said he felt like he was approaching burnout in late February. Ontario's weekly case count had nearly doubled to 177 over a two-week period ending Feb. 27, with almost half of the overall cases located in his southwestern public health unit. Pressure was high to trace cases, halt community spread and stop infections. Measles was on his mind every moment of the day and night. 'You could sense a bit of tension and anxiety in all this discussion,' Tran recalled in late May. 'It's always like a temporary feeling of doubt, fear, anxiety when we see numbers go up and there's just a lot of things coming right at you,' Tran said of the outbreak's early days. 'And then you have to step back and say, 'OK, it's not going to be helpful if I get stressed because I need to — and other leaders have to — figure out a way to move forward.' The spread of measles has ebbed and flowed, but Tran noted a steady decline of new cases mid-June. 'While it's still early to confirm a persistent pattern, the consistency of the decrease does suggest a potential shift in the trajectory of the outbreak,' said Tran. 'We are cautiously encouraged.' This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 20, 2025. Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content. Hannah Alberga, The Canadian Press
CBC
an hour ago
- CBC
Nova Scotia Health works to speed up sepsis treatment
Nova Scotia Health is equipping front-line caregivers in some of the province's emergency rooms with potentially life-saving tools to treat sepsis. A team has been working to implement changes to enable a faster response when people present with sepsis symptoms. Sepsis is caused by the body's overreaction to an infection that is already present. Cases have been on the rise for the past few decades, according to Sepsis Canada. Recommendations from the health authority's own reviews into patient care are cited as factors for the changes. "Sepsis is a very real issue in our province," said Dr. Vanessa Sweet, the central zone sepsis team co-lead. "It was clear to us that we needed to take a different approach to it." The team examined the approaches of other health systems that have made progress in the area to then bring some of those ideas to the front lines of emergency care in Nova Scotia. One thing the group developed are sepsis treatment kits that include all the supplies needed to act fast. "And it has proven that way, I've seen these used many times, people are grabbing for them, instead of having to go pull things and getting pulled to different situations," said Terri McGregor, a registered nurse at Twin Oaks Memorial Hospital in Musquodoboit Harbour. Inside the ready-to-deploy boxes are blood-testing equipment, intravenous fluid supplies and tourniquets along with requisition forms and detailed instructions. Nurses now administer life-saving antibiotics Another key new care directive allows nurses to begin antibiotic treatment without approval from a physician. "If we had no physician on site, say, they're getting those antibiotics immediately," McGregor said. "This lets nurses work to their full scope of practice," said Sweet. Twin Oaks, Cobequid Community Health Centre in Lower Sackville and Hants Community Hospital in Windsor began implementing the changes in the first phase of the project. "Now over 90 per cent of patients at the three sites are receiving their antibiotics within the three-hour recommended time frame," Sweet said. "We've seen a drastic improvement in that," she said, adding the previous number was around 60 per cent. The program has since grown to include six hospitals, according to Nova Scotia Health. 'Every hour is absolutely essential' Detecting and treating sepsis early can be the difference between life and death, said the scientific co-chair of Sepsis Canada. "We know from the literature that every hour that someone is in severe sepsis and they're not getting appropriate treatment, their chance of dying goes up by 10 per cent," said Dr. Osama Loubani, who is also an emergency room physician in Halifax. "Every hour is absolutely essential." Karen Moxsom from Hardwood Lands in central Nova Scotia saw how fast sepsis can take hold when her husband got sick. A quality review of 74-year-old Gordon Moxsom's case was conducted after he died just over two years ago. At the time, his wife had not even heard of the condition. "There's not enough awareness out there for sepsis, it can happen so quickly. It's one of the top leading killers with cancer, with heart attacks," said Moxsom. "Nobody knows anything about it." She still maintains her husband may not have contracted sepsis had he not been discharged from the QEII Health Sciences Centre in Halifax with a catheter — where she thinks the infection started — following treatment of earlier heart problems. Included in the review is Moxsom's complaint that she did not receive proper guidance following her husband's discharge about how to monitor for infection, or any education about sepsis symptoms. She's still pushing for answers about his care and is encouraged to see there is further action to improve treatment. "I'm happy that they are doing it. I was glad to see that because I feel like I was a part of that by reporting what happened to Gordie." Moxsom now wants to see the changes implemented provincewide, which is something the action improvement team is now looking at as it attempts to scale up its work. The Halifax Infirmary is scheduled to start in the fall. A provincial rollout is planned after that.
CBC
an hour ago
- CBC
Tire particles, perfumes, metals? Extensive study of Toronto air looks at what we're breathing in
What's contributing to Toronto's air pollution? 1 hour ago Duration 1:59 Walking down Fort York Boulevard on a fresh, breezy afternoon, scientist Elisabeth Galarneau has no issue pointing out possible sources of air pollution. The manicured lawns and flower beds? A potential source of airborne pesticides. The nearby high-rise apartment buildings? A source of pollutants from both heating and cooling, not to mention the cleaners and personal care products being used inside — remnants of which could be circulating down at street level. Charcoal barbecues, restaurant stoves, fire pits, squealing tires, nearby highways? They all contribute to the air Torontonians breathe. Now, the first glimpse at an in-depth study conducted by Galarneau and over 100 other scientists looking at winter air quality in Toronto is shedding light on rarely-measured air pollutants across the city, such as microplastics, brake wear chemicals, and metals. "We've done this study to kind of look at the whole mixture of what people are exposed to in cities, as well as how that varies from neighbourhood to neighbourhood," said Garlarneau, who works for Environment and Climate Change Canada. Researchers 'didn't expect' to see AQHI exceeded As the principal investigator on the Study of Winter Air Pollution in Toronto, known by the acronym SWAPIT, Galarneau led a group, that included contributors from 11 universities, that collected air samples from across the city over six weeks from January to March 2024. Winter is a "typically understudied part of the year" that's known for having cleaner air than the smoggy summers, Galarneau said — making the early results of their work all the more surprising. "We thought we would see low concentrations" of pollutants, said Galarneau. Instead, they clocked a number of instances of pollutants heading into moderate or high risk levels on the Air Quality Health Index (AQHI). "That air quality health index, I didn't expect to see it exceeded in the winter," she said. Another surprise? The degree of variation in air pollution depending on neighbourhood. Monitoring sites were placed across Toronto, from Pearson Airport in the west, York University to the north, and University of Toronto Scarborough in the east. One site was even perched on the CN Tower, 275 metres in the air. "Some pollutants are quite uniform across the city," Galarneau said. "But other ones are sometimes 40 times higher than the average depending where you're looking." The specifics of where air pollution is worse — and by what degree — will be revealed in the next year or so, when the study's peer-reviewed results are published in full. Looking for patterns To prepare for that publication, Galarneau and her colleagues will now begin a large-scale piece of detective work: determining where the pollutants are coming from, the health impacts for the people breathing them in, and the ways in which factors like income affect exposure. "The data set that we're producing here is going to help us to maybe see some patterns here in Toronto, and then expand that to other cities in Canada," she said. That forthcoming analysis on health impacts has drawn the attention of Jeffrey Brook, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health, whose work on air pollution is cited by SWAPIT researchers. "How can it be that in places like Canada where generally our [transportation emission] levels are considered some of the lowest in the world, we can continue to see health effects?" he said. "That's a big mystery, not just for Canada, but for the world." Over in Mississauga, environmental activist Rahul Mehta also looks forward to seeing SWAPIT's results laid out in full. Mehta, who heads up an organization called Sustainable Mississauga, says poor air quality impacts him both at work, where he encourages newcomers to try active transportation, and personally, as he deals with allergies and mild asthma. "Knowing these risks … I think that's going to help us, it's going to protect us and it's going to then maybe empower us to demand some better regulations from government," he said. Toronto Public Health, which is a partner on the SWAPIT study, said that its results promise to be useful for exactly that reason, telling CBC Toronto in an email that the study outcomes will "provide valuable evidence to guide local policies and actions."
