THE CRUELLE ST ALL-CLEAR ‘I look at Teddy and think of how much I missed’
Months of gruelling chemotherapy. A double mastectomy. The fear she wouldn’t see her son grow up. Then came the shocking twist ... Sarah was told she’d never had cancer in the first place
‘I’d cuddle my son and worry I was going to die’
WHEN the telephone call came, Sarah Boyle thought it was the one she had been dreading for seven long months.
Months in which the 26-year-old young mother had endured gruelling chemotherapy and a double mastectomy to fight the rare and aggressive form of breast cancer with which she had been
diagnosed only nine months after the birth of her first child.
The prognosis had not been good. With her tumour apparently unresponsive to chemotherapy, Sarah had lain awake night after long night, terrified she was dying and desolate at the prospect of leaving her husband and their little boy, Teddy, to face a future without her.
Now the cancer clinic was on the phone, requesting she come in immediately. ‘I honestly thought this was it,’ she says, her eyes filling with tears at the memory.
‘That the cancer was terminal and there was nothing more the doctors could do.’
In fact, the news from her consultant was joyful and devastating in equal measure: while Sarah was cancer-free, it was only because she never had the disease in the first place.
In a remarkable and cruel twist, she was told that the pathologist who had examined her original biopsy had wrongly reported her results and the diagnosis had all been a terrible mistake.
All her treatment — the painful surgery, the debilitating chemotherapy and the insistent drumbeat of fear that had underpinned it — had been entirely unnecessary.
Sarah’s ordeal, first revealed in the Mail two weeks ago, is believed to be one of a few cases of its kind — so rare that the now 29-year-old knows of only one other case in the UK in which breast cancer has been misdiagnosed.
For that we must all be thankful, for the impact of that human error has been huge — not just for Sarah, a call-centre worker, but also her husband, Steven, 31, a former recruitment consultant.
Indeed, it is clearly close to the surface when we meet for this, her first full interview about her ordeal: tears come easily and she has visible palpitations when recalling some of the more visceral details of her treatment.
No wonder both she and Steven are on medication for anxiety. ‘It may sound odd, but I honestly think it would have been easier to cope with if the doctors had told me that I’d had cancer and had beaten it,’ Sarah says.
‘As it is, if I find a bruise even now, all these months later, I think: “Oh, it’s cancer.” Then I have to remind myself I never had it.
‘Fighting cancer was all so real and horrible at the time that it’s hard to convince myself it was never there. When you spend months staring death in the face, it is so hard to unpick that and return to normal.’
Yet normal is exactly what Sarah’s life was until a single mistake turned it upside down.
One of five daughters born in Staffordshire, the pretty, quietly spoken blonde met Steven, then 25, at a day out at Uttoxeter races, and the couple married a year later in April 2015.
Teddy — a honeymoon baby — came along nine months later. ‘He was a very happy surprise,’ says his mother.
By then Sarah had already been to the doctors several times with concerns about a cyst at the top of her right breast.
‘It would fluctuate in size, but each time I was told it was hormonal and nothing to worry about but to keep an eye on it,’ she recalls.
It’s one reason why, when the cyst appeared to thicken in size after she gave birth to Teddy in February 2016 that she remained alert — particularly when Teddy refused to breastfeed from her right breast.
She went to the doctor once more — this time he referred her to the breast clinic at the Royal Stoke University Hospital, where she was told her cyst was ‘suspicious’ and required a biopsy.
‘It was stressful,’ Sarah recalls. ‘I kept reminding myself it had always been benign and there was no reason to suspect any differently now.’
On this occasion, though, she received a phone call from a breast cancer nurse asking her to attend an outpatients’ appointment.
‘She said the biopsy had upgraded the cyst to Grade 4, which is suspected cancer,’ says Sarah. ‘I remember asking if I should be worried, and she said I needed to brace myself because it didn’t look good.’
Overwhelmed with fear, Sarah and Steven were already imagining the worst. ‘We were newlyweds with a new baby — we hadn’t been prepared for this,’ she recalls.
Who would be? Yet they had no choice, for Sarah’s subsequent appointment brought the news they both had been dreading.
‘Before I saw the consultant, I asked the nurse if it was cancer — and she said: “Yes”,’ Sarah recalls. ‘I was so overwhelmed with fear that for a few moments my vision went, and I couldn’t see. I’d tried to steel myself, but nothing can prepare you for those words.’
The next hour passed in a blur. ‘I had a meeting with the surgeon who told me I would have chemotherapy and then I would see him in a few months’ time,’ Sarah recalls. ‘Yet at that point they hadn’t even told me what kind of cancer it was. I was bewildered.’
That job was left to a kindly breast cancer nurse called Helen, who took Sarah into a side room and broke the news that she had an aggressive form of triple negative breast cancer, a relatively rare cancer that occurs in only 10 to 20 per cent of cases.
Worse, Sarah’s youth and the fact she was breastfeeding meant there was an increased likelihood the cancer could have spread to other parts of her body.
‘I was hysterical,’ says Sarah. ‘I remember asking if I was going to die. All the nurse could tell me was that their aim was to treat this the best they could.’ In Sarah’s case that
meant 16 rounds of chemotherapy over four months — something which brought with it the prospect of losing her future fertility.
‘Chemotherapy plunges you into menopause, so I was offered the chance to freeze my eggs. But that would have delayed treatment by six to eight weeks, time I thought I could ill afford,’ she says.
‘The doctor told me to think of the baby on my knee, not babies I didn’t have — and that meant starting treatment straight away. My attitude was no matter the diagnosis, I was going to beat it.
‘I didn’t have a choice: I had to do it for Steven and Teddy.’
It was just one of many fluctuating emotions as Sarah entered the lonely ‘cancer bubble’ familiar to anyone who has fought this most cruel of diseases.
‘I alternated between anger, self-pity and blame,’ she says. ‘On so many occasions I would be cuddling Teddy and wondering if I was going to die and leave him.
‘I blamed myself, wondering if I had gone to the doctor a week earlier I would be facing better odds. Most of all I was just sick with worry. It was so hard for Steven, too. He felt helpless and was terrified of losing me.’
The physical side-effects of chemotherapy were no less gruelling either.
‘Losing my hair was the least of it,’ recalls Sarah. ‘I was exhausted, constantly sick and had horrible ulcers and blurred vision.’
And so what should have been a magical first Christmas as a family was dominated by Sarah’s chemotherapy schedule. Poignantly, she was too sick to attend Teddy’s first birthday party. As time went on, the veins on her arms became so swollen and painful that she struggled to pick up her baby.
‘The effect on Teddy was the worst part of it,’ she says quietly. ‘I hated having to give up breastfeeding — I remember sobbing through the bars of his cot as he reached for me to feed him.
‘Then my arms were so inflamed that on one occasion I nearly dropped him. I rang my oncologist pleading with them to let me miss the last round of chemotherapy so it wouldn’t get worse, although, of course, he told me I couldn’t.’
Moreover, Sarah’s prognosis did not seem to be improving: an MRI scan halfway through her chemotherapy showed that the cyst had shrunk by only a millimetre. ‘The scanner said it was rare to see a tumour that had shrunk so little. I was heartbroken,’ she says, her voice catching at the memory.
The prognosis seemed so grim, in fact, that when her chemotherapy did end in April 2017, her surgeon told her she should have a double mastectomy.
‘I said yes immediately,’ says Sarah. ‘I didn’t even care about reconstruction — I just wanted my breasts gone. I was scared about surgery, of course, but I would have done anything to protect me and my baby’s future.’
The gruelling five-hour operation took place in May 2017. ‘I was in a lot of pain and had terrible bruising — but all I could think was that if this way I would be cancer free, I would handle it.’
The omens did not seem good, though, particularly when Sarah received a call telling her that her follow-up appointment had been brought forward by ten days. ‘I immediately thought something terrible had happened, that they were going to tell me my breast tissue and lymph nodes had been full of cancer,’ she says. The next few days passed in what she can only describe as a ‘permanent state of fear’ — enhanced by her and Steven’s arrival at the silent and empty breast clinic. ‘I thought they had cleared everyone out to tell me the bad news,’ she recalls. Quite the opposite: the surgeon told her and Steven he had removed all the breast tissue and found no cancer. ‘I was hysterical,’ Sarah recalls. ‘I remember just hugging Teddy and sobbing into his soft little head saying: “Teddy, Mummy’s not going to die.” I thought he meant that I’d beaten it.’
It was at this point that the cancer nurse gently told her that she had not understood: she had never had cancer to start with. ‘I couldn’t take it in,’ Sarah says. ‘It didn’t make sense. I just remember feeling this huge confusion.’
It was just one of a tumult of emotions that followed: relief, of course, coupled with a visceral anger at what she had been unnecessarily put through, and guilt, too, at not feeling happier.
They are emotions that are still there two-and-a-half years on — along with an underlying, occasionally paralysing fear that somehow the cancer is there after all.
‘A part of me is convinced the mistake is a mistake, if that makes sense?’ she says. ‘The fear of a cancer diagnosis has stayed with me. Sights and smells that remind me of that time send me into panic — I become so disoriented that I think I am going to fall over.’
In a cruel twist, Sarah recently learned that the textured breast implants she was given during her reconstruction have been linked to a rare form of cancer and withdrawn in France. She is considering having them replaced. ‘The clinic said there was a one in 30,000 chance of me getting the disease — but it’s a statistic I wouldn’t have faced if I hadn’t been misdiagnosed,’ she says.
The one beacon in the darkness has been the unexpected joy of a positive pregnancy test. ‘I honestly thought after the chemo I could never conceive again, so I was overjoyed — although I was scared, as I knew there were risks with falling pregnant within a year of finishing chemotherapy.’
Happily, those fears were unfounded: Louis, now seven months, gurgles on her lap throughout our interview. ‘He’s the same age as Teddy when all this started,’ she says. ‘I look at him and think about how young Teddy was and how much we missed out on.’
It’s one reason Sarah decided to sue the University Hospitals of North Midlands NHS Trust, which runs the Royal Stoke University Hospital. They have admitted liability, and apologised for their devastating error.
‘A misdiagnosis of this kind is exceptionally rare, and we understand how devastating this has been for Sarah and her family,’ a spokesman said. ‘Ultimately, the misreporting of the biopsy was a human error so, as an extra safeguard, all invasive cancer diagnoses are now reviewed by a second pathologist.’
It is comfort of some kind for Sarah, who says their acknowledgement has helped bring closure — of a sort.
‘On one level, I do know how lucky I am,’ she says. ‘I made friends on the cancer ward who are no longer with us. But even now, part of me thinks I am going to die. And I don’t know how long it will take to shake that off.’