When Sylvie Marotte discovered a painful lump in her left breast, she feared the worst.
But a Montreal-area radiologist who conducted her mammogram told her not to worry: it was just a bruise.
Still, the pain persisted for months and Marotte decided to get a second opinion and more tests.
The results floored her – she had breast cancer, which had already spread to her back. Eventually, it reached her brain.
Marotte's misdiagnosis was not the only one.
A sweeping review by the Quebec College of Physicians found 109 previously undetected cases of breast cancer in the province.
The majority of the misdiagnoses -- 96 cases -- were attributed to the work of one radiologist, who worked at three different private clinics and retired in 2010.
The other 13 cancer cases were discovered after the Quebec College of Physicians expanded its investigation to include other radiologists working in the same clinics.
The review concluded that those 13 cancers would not have been obvious in the initial scan.
Every woman who was misdiagnosed has been notified and is now undergoing treatment. It's too soon to tell how the delay in treatment will affect the patients, the college said.
"We're angry," Marotte told Â鶹´«Ã½, sitting next to her husband at home, her bald head covered with a bandanna.
"If I received treatments months before, things may have been different."
College president Dr. Charles Bernard, said mammograms can be "very difficult" to read and it's not uncommon to find discrepancies in radiologists' findings.
Breast lesions, especially small ones, are often difficult to spot on a mammogram and it takes a lot of skill and expertise to read the scan correctly, the college said.
However, in the case of the retired radiologist, the error rate was too high.
"It's a very abnormal number of cases that were diagnosed (after) re-reading, and we are sad about that," Bernard told Â鶹´«Ã½.
About 22,000 mammograms had to be re-examined after the College of Physicians was notified about suspected errors in the radiologist's work and ordered a sweeping review of the tests.
The probe looked at all of his cases between October 2008 and October 2010, as well as other mammograms done at the clinics where he worked.
Frederic Desjardins, President of the Quebec Association of Radiologists, said the radiologist often worked alone and had a heavy caseload.
The panel tasked with reviewing suspect mammograms has made 10 recommendations to avoid similar errors in the future. They include double-checking and digitizing mammogram images and linking private clinics with the public health system to avoid gaps in patient care.
"I can tell you that it was our quality system that detected the mistakes," Quebec's Health Minister, Dr. Yves Bolduc, told reporters Tuesday. "We want to improve that and the most important thing is that we want to give good care to every patient."
"We're going to look at the recommendations of the college of doctors and we're going to work with them."
This is not the first controversy involving breast-cancer tests in Canada.
Newfoundland launched a judicial inquiry a few years ago after mistakes were detected in 386 tests. Those errors affected patients who had already been diagnosed with breast cancer but may not have received the correct treatment following mistakes in hormone receptor tests.
More than a dozen recommendations were made to improve the health care system.
With reports from CTV's Genevieve Beauchemin and Cindy Sherwin and files from The Canadian Press
