Doc said cancer was anorexia - THIRTY times
DANCER TELLS HOW DREAMS HAVE BEEN DASHED
SCOTS dancer Amy White today reveals how a doctor failed to spot she had BONE CANCER - despite THIRTY visits to the surgery.
The bungling GP kept telling her that pains in her legs were caused by ANOREXIA - and dismissed her as NEUROTIC.
And by the time Amy, 20, got the right diagnosis from a different medic the disease had caused so much damage she'll never dance again.
Amy could sue the NHS over the appalling blunder - but the caring student told the News of the World: "I'm not taking legal action - there is no point in being bitter. That's not going to change anything.
"I don't want to take money away from the NHS that could be used to help other people. I'm just grateful to be alive."
Amy - now in remission after chemotherapy - began suffering from chronic pains in her right leg in September 2006. When they got steadily worse, she went to her GP.
"I'd just started a year-long dance course at college, but was finding it difficult to even walk about," she says.
"I also began falling over for no apparent reason and lost two stones in weight so I went to the doctor."
But she was astonished at his diagnosis . . . anorexia. "I was shocked as I've always had a healthy appetite. I'm naturally slim," says Amy, who lives with her mother Nova, 54, a canteen assistant.
"I told him I was eating normally, but he handed me a piece of paper with a number on it for an eating disorders counsellor. I just left in tears."
Worried Amy went back to the surgery ONCE A WEEK for EIGHT MONTHS, and every time, he told her the same thing. "He said I was neurotic and that the pains in my leg were just in my head - even though I had to use a walking stick. My mum came along with me and kept telling him I didn't have a problem with eating, and I had a healthy appetite - but he insisted I was anorexic."
Driven to despair, Amy, from Paisley, Renfrewshire, finally asked to see a different doctor at the same surgery. This time she was sent for an MRI scan.
"The doctor had taken one look at my leg and could see the muscle deterioration there - so she sent me for an appointment at the hospital straight away."
The scan revealed she was suffering from an aggressive tumour in her right hip bone - a form of cancer called Ewing's Sarcoma.
She says: "In a way it was relief that I finally had a diagnosis. It was devastating to know that I had cancer, but at least I had some answers. I had lost all the weight due to the cancer - nothing to do with anorexia."
Amy had six months of gruelling chemotherapy, ending in October 2007 and followed by an operation to remove the tumour.
Doctors have now declared she is in remission and a scan at the end of September showed there is no sign of the cancer returning.
But her dreams of being a dancer have been dashed. She said: "If I had been treated earlier, the muscle wouldn't have deteriorated so badly and I may have been able to dance again, which is something that I've always loved doing."
Now Amy is planning to start studying to be a counsellor at Glasgow University next year. "I am so angry that I wasn't taken seriously - to be told I had anorexia when I actually had cancer was just devastating," she says.
"But now I just want to put it all behind me and just get on with my life."
AMY has been supported by Macmillan Cancer Support. For more information visit macmillan. org.uk
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