My 10 Years of Terror ; Told She Had Breast Cancer,This Mother Endured the Trauma of a Mastectomy, Years of Agonising Complications and Constant Fear. Yet It Was All a Mistake . . . Part of a Huge Screening Scandal That has Blighted Hundreds of Lives

Daily Mail › July 19, 2005

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Summary

DERETA GREENAWAY, 58, a mother of two from Kent, was told she had breast cancer after a pathologist at Kent and Canterbury Hospital misdiagnosed her biopsy. The blunder was part of Britain's biggest cancer-screening scandal which resulted in the deaths of eight women and needless surgery for many more. Here Dereta tells MARIANNE POWER about her experience.

THERE was nothing unusual about the brown envelope that arrived for Dereta Greenaway, nothing to indicate it was a letter that would change her life.

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Extract

My 10 Years of Terror ; Told She Had Breast Cancer,This Mother Endured the Trauma of a Mastectomy, Years of Agonising Complications and Constant Fear. Yet It Was All a Mistake . . . Part of a Huge Screening Scandal That has Blighted Hundreds of Lives

Polite and to the point, it said that she needed to contact her GP urgently.

Immediately, Dereta feared the worst - that the breast cancer diagnosed ten years before had returned.

The 58-year- old former art gallery owner who had returned to England for a few weeks from her new life in Egypt, made an appointment to see the doctor the next day.

What he told her was almost as devastating as the first diagnosis.

Because of a mistaken evaluation of a biopsy in the hospital laboratory - uncovered almost ten years later - she'd endured not only a mastectomy but also a decade of fear, uncertainty and eight further operations for absolutely no ...

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