Breast cancer help!! Any drs here? Please

[Namechangestime]

So just got off the phone to my mother, she was diagnosed with stage 2 cancer in 2001, mascetomy and chemo and then fully in remission.

she had a mammogram today after some tenderness and the woman at the clinic looked on her scan notes and said she had been diagnosed with cancer in 2016 and asked what treatment she had received. My mother was never diagnosed with cancer in 2016 so didn’t have any treatment. She did however have a routine mammogram by one of those vans. She had a rough year then as she lost both parents within 6 months, so she can’t recall if she even had a results letter.

she’s called her GP who’ve said the dr will call you back , but she’s spiralling. My dad just died of cancer a couple of months ago too.

im trying to be rational, that if cancer was present in 2016, you wouldn’t get to nearly 2023 symptom free! But truthfully I don’t know anything about cancer!

can anyone provide any words of wisdom here!

I'm a breast surgeon.

I suspect it was a mistake, either looking at the wrong records, records incorrect or misread. They wouldn't have just noted that she had cancer and not chased it up to her and GP, even if she'd missed letters. Plus she's presumably had screens since where it would face been flagged. Try not to worry

Having just seen my mother go through untreated breast cancer (complicated story) you're absolutely right that it's very, very unlikely she would have gone nearly 7 years and had nothing show up.

Nor would they have diagnosed and then just left it without getting hold of her or passing that info to her GP. I've seen clinics put cancer call-ins in taxis to be delivered when they can't hold of patients any other way quickly.

It's likely an error in the records or the way they've been read. Please tell her not to panic.

She’s just terrified she either missed the letter or it never got sent out in some sort of admin error. She’s recalling the time I had an appendicitis and wasn’t operated on out of error (luckily went down) but I was meant to have a follow up but it never came, and then years later we got a letter saying the consultant had Been struck off (something to that effect) but I’m trying to reason with her that there is a huge huge difference between that and cancer but she’s spiralling saying it could be a slow growing cancer

It sounds like in 2016, somebody intended to input that there was a previous history of breast cancer, which in 2022 was read as a 2016 diagnosis of cancer.

That could be an input error made in 2016, a reading error made in 2022, or some kind of error introduced when data was being transferred or converted at any point inbetween. It's different, I know, but my NHS GP app shows wrong dates for all kinds of diagnoses and test results due to how data has been transferred.