A mother and daughter were wrongly diagnosed with muscular dystrophy and treated for seven years. At the Nancy University Hospital, this is not the first diagnostic error of such magnitude.
For seven years, Mireille and her daughter scrupulously followed their treatment. They juggled physiotherapist sessions, hospital appointments, exams, medication. An occupational therapist has been commissioned to rearrange their home so that it adapts to their future disability, an inevitable development of the disease.
“Psychological torture”
Mireille was diagnosed with mitochondrial myopathy in 2008 by the Nancy University Hospital. At the time, she was 37 years old and felt severe pain in her joints. Little by little, his life is turned upside down. She imagines ending up in a wheelchair. She knows that there is no cure for this degenerative pathology which affects the muscles of the body.
“I cut myself off from the world. I lost my job and ended up living as a recluse at home, not seeing anyone anymore, ”she says. in the newspaper l’Est Républicain. But the worst is yet to come. A few months later, her 8-year-old daughter suffered from severe fatigue. Mireille rushes to the hospital, worried about having transmitted this genetic disease to her. In fact, the doctors make the same diagnosis on the little girl, who will undergo identical treatment.
“It was a real psychological torture for me. I was very angry with myself. I was so deep in the hole that I even asked my companion to leave me, to leave with the children. I did not want them to see me wasting away and I did not want, either, to see my little one decline, ”testifies the mother of the family in the columns of the local press. His relationship with his daughter, now a teenager, deteriorates.
A miss”
And then, twist. At the beginning of 2014, Mireille received an embarrassed call from the Nancy University Hospital. There was “a failure”. A new neurologist from the hospital has spotted “anomalies and contradictions in the medical record,” the family lawyer, Yves-Pierre Joffroy, told AFP. A few exams later, the mother and her daughter learn that in fact, they have never suffered from myopathy.
Today, Mireille is fuming. “We were told that we should be happy not to be myopathic, it’s too easy. You realize, all those very heavy medical treatments that we took for nothing! What are the side effects? She asks herself. Moreover, she still does not know what disease she suffers from.
His lawyer claimed 100,000 euros in damages. “The whole life of his family has been oriented towards a life of suffering,” he explains. He also requested and expertise to know the consequences of the medication imposed on the mother and her daughter.
2nd error in a month
In a press release sent to AFP, the hospital observes that “the elements exposed do not seem to reflect the complexity of the files whose examination has been requested by independent medical experts”. The management refuses to comment “on the medical follow-up of patients or on ongoing procedures”.
This case arises in a delicate context for the University Hospital of Nancy. In December, the press echoed another medical error within the hospital. A man was wrongly diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and treated for ten years.
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