Seven different doctors failed to diagnose teen’s cancer before she died

Seven different doctors failed to diagnose a 17-year-old girl’s cancer before she died.

Her mum, Ms. Jones, has now spoken out about the treatment her daughter experienced in the weeks leading up to her death.

Ms. Jones, said she had watched her ‘happy, healthy’ daughter Ruby become ‘more and more’ ill in 2019. She said the 17-year-old had ‘barely ever’ been sick, but she was suddenly tired ‘all the time’, had a pain in her shoulder and would wake up with a ‘puffed face’ in the morning despite usually having a slim face.

Ms. Jones told The Telegraph that over six weeks, her daughter’s symptoms grew worse. They would regularly go back to the doctors with the hope that ‘someone would join the dots’, and one GP even recommended an allergy test to check her symptoms.

But although the allergy test came back to say Ruby was allergic to tree pollen and dust, her symptoms seemed too severe to be just an allergy. Ms. Jones said: “She was really tired and started to get these weird bruises on her abdomen which we couldn’t explain.”

It has been reported that Ruby attended seven appointments, with different doctors before her case was escalated. One doctor told Ms. Jones ‘not to worry’ about Ruby, even though her own Google searches of symptoms were showing a ‘terrifying’ diagnosis including lung cancer.

Ms. Jones said:

“I’d Googled her symptoms and if you put into Google ‘sore shoulder, swollen face’ it suggested it could be lung cancer, that a tumour pressing on what’s called the superior vena cava can cause those kinds of symptoms. 

“I think on about the fifth appointment I just came out with it and said, ‘I’ve Googled these symptoms and I’m really really concerned. It suggests lung cancer.’ And the doctor virtually laughed at me and said, ‘not in a 17-year-old. You just don’t need to worry about that.’”

Ms. Jones said that as her daughter became more sick, she ‘grew frantic’ and asked the GP to refer Ruby for an X-ray, but the doctor told her ‘it’s not worth the risk of the radiation for someone so young’.

However, on her seventh visit, a new GP found that Ruby’s resting pulse was 120 – which was ‘unusual’.

Ms. Jones recalled that the GP said ‘obviously something really odd is going on, because we’ve seen you seven times in the last two months and before that we hadn’t seen you for ages. So something’s up.’

Hours after the x-ray, the GP called after speaking to colleagues at King’s College Hospital and they wanted to see Ruby straight away.

“They did a chest x-ray and I remember standing behind that screen, and I’m not a medical professional, I know nothing about x-rays, but you could just see this thing on the x-ray and I could feel the staff around me kind of freeze,” says Ms. Jones.

“I thought yep, there it is, there’s that tumour that I knew was there.” 

Ms. Jones said Ruby’s prognosis could have been different had the GP surgery been obliged to follow Jess’s Law. The law, named for Jessica Brady, who died in December 2020, would require a case to be elevated for review after a patient contacted their GP surgery for the third time.

“Obviously, she didn’t survive her cancer. It didn’t respond to the standard treatment – they had to switch her to much more intense treatment. She then had to have a stem cell transplant, and none of it stopped the cancer. 

“If they’d started eight weeks earlier, maybe they could have stopped [it], we’ll never know,” Ms. Jones said.

Further reading

Medical misdiagnosis or delay – Oakwood Solicitors

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