A doctor in New Zealand missed a patient’s cancer twice. When the woman noticed the misdiagnosis, any help came too late.
This article first appeared on RTL.de.
Gemma Malins went to the doctor twice to have the big bumps that she suddenly had on her legs and feet examined. The teacher from New Zealand was told twice that she didn’t have to worry, that it was just “fat”. It wasn’t until a year later that another doctor made the correct diagnosis: Gemma has cancer. As the British “Sun” reports, too late to save the young woman’s life.
The cancer was already at a critical stage
Gemma told the “NZ Herald” that she was told on her first visit to the doctor that she did not have to worry about the knob under her skin, it was “fat accumulation” and “definitely not cancer”. But the young woman worried: “I went back three months later when it had grown to the size of a tennis ball. Another had grown on my chest.” Again the doctor made a wrong diagnosis.
It wasn’t until Gemma went to see another doctor a year later after moving that she received the correct – and unfortunately terrible – diagnosis. After a biopsy, she was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma that had already spread throughout her body. Also in the brain and in the lungs.
Although she was immediately referred to a cancer specialist, Gemma had to wait another three months for treatment because she had no health insurance in New Zealand.
New Zealand: Even expensive therapy could no longer save the woman
Gemma and her fiancé Brandon, whom she referred to as her “soul mate”, married shortly after their diagnosis. The impromptu wedding was planned within two weeks. Before they fell ill, she and Brandon had already planned their entire lives, wanted to have children and build a future together.
Gemma’s family and friends raised money through an online donation platform so she could get privately funded immunotherapy. However, this did not work as expected. After Gemma’s health stabilized for twelve months, the cancer began to spread again. Brandon wrote on the online donation page, “After hoping a new $ 20,000 immunotherapy would work, we were told in early June that Gemma only had a few months to live because she was on the new, expensive treatment There are new melanomas in your brain, neck and lungs, others in your stomach have grown, and still others just don’t respond. “
Your last wish
Brandon asked for more donations so that Gemma could check off at least a few more things on her list of things to do before she died. In fact, she made several trips with her husband, saw snow, took a helicopter ride, and rode a horse for the first time.
Two and a half years after the misdiagnosis, Gemma died at the age of just 28. For her husband Brandon she was “the love and the light in my world”, as he wrote on the page of the online petition.
