Gambling with Your Life

On a summer day in September a stunned Janecek, 61, received a call from her doctor with test results from her routine colonoscopy. The doctor had told her that she had intestinal cancer and she was in shock, because prior to that she had been successfully treated for intestinal cancer. She ended up having surgery and they removed about two feet of her small and large intestines. As time went on after the surgery she wasn't feeling right and was having severe to moderate pains she was beginning to wonder if they had gotten all the cancer. When she went back for her six-week checkup she was informed by her physician that there may have been a contamination with her specimen, and that she didn't have the cancer after all. The originating doctor questioned the lab work but they never found an error and so she ended up suing the hospital for their negligence and won, but to this day she still suffers from abdominal pains and other digestive problems.

Some people think of medical errors as the wrong organ removed or they were prescribed the wrong drug. The fact is that there are tens of millions of blood samples, biopsies and tissue specimens every year where they have been mislabeled or interpreted wrong. It has been estimated each year that in the U.S. that more than 2.9 million errors occur. These errors can cause thousands and millions of deaths or harm each year, but still it is inevitable that people are going to make mistakes, but they should be looked over by more than one person before the doctor issues a treatment plan.

Elaine Thomas, 42, was also a victim of being misdiagnosed she had a mammogram done at a local hospital in July of 2002. She never heard any news from the doctor or received a letter in the mail so she figured no news was better than any news. In May, 2004 she had felt a lump under her left breast, so she scheduled an appointment with the doctor