A UK woman has spoken about the “horrendous” experience of undergoing chemotherapy for 11 years to treat an aggressive brain tumour it turns out she never had. <\/p>\n
In 2012 at the age of 21, Becky Jones was diagnosed and told by an experienced medical consultant that she needed a chemotherapy drug called temozolomide. <\/p>\n
“He told me that if I didn’t take the temozolomide, then I would die. I had six to 12 months to live, and I would be on it for life,” she told the BBC. <\/p>\n
Despite national guidelines which say the drug should usually only be taken for six months, Jones took temozolomide tablets for 11 years, which she described as “horrendous”. <\/p>\n
“Constant nausea, stomach pains, mouth ulcers, just day-to-day fatigue. It was awful,” Jones explained.<\/p>\n
Jones said she didn’t attend family events because of concerns about food poisoning, and restrictions were also placed on her driver licence. <\/p>\n
In 2024, she had a call to say that her consultant, Professor Ian Brown, had retired and her treatment would be stopping. <\/p>\n
After that, she learned she never had cancer at all. <\/p>\n
“It really upset me, to be honest, to think that I’d gone through so many years of worry that I was going to die, and then, you know, I didn’t need to worry. I didn’t need to step on eggshells throughout the whole of my life because actually there was nothing wrong.” <\/p>\n
The now 34-year-old mother-of-two is one of more than 40 patients taking legal action against University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) NHS Trust due to prolonged or unnecessary cancer treatment.<\/p>\n
The Royal College of Physicians was also investigating 20 cases where people received temozolomide at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire for longer than recommended guidelines. <\/p>\n
The review hasn’t been published yet, but a letter leaked to the BBC last week revealed some of the findings, including that patients were routinely prescribed the drug, and that some were over diagnosed with more aggressive tumours than they actually had.<\/p>\n
“It made the hairs on my back stand up. To be honest, I think it was so chilling to find out how many failings had been going on over the years and why nobody had picked it up.”<\/p>\n
Experts acting on behalf of Jones’ lawyers said she actually had an inflammation of the brain, which could be treated with steroids. <\/p>\n
“He’s just ruined my life essentially for for no reason. You know, I never had a brain tumor. I was misdiagnosed, and I’ve gone through all this treatment for the main part of my adult life for no reason.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A UK woman has spoken about the “horrendous” experience of undergoing chemotherapy for 11 years to treat an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":600570,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[156,134,111,139,69,1745],"class_list":["post-600569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-health","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-uk-europe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=600569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600569\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/600570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=600569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=600569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=600569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}