A mum-of-three passed away just weeks after being misdiagnosed by a doctor in a phone call. Laura Barlow had been living in pain for months.
The 33-year-old thought the pain was connected to a diagnosis of endometriosis she received from her GP during a five-minute phone call.
But three months down the line, when she was finally referred to a cancer clinic, she was told there was “nothing the doctors could do” for her.
She was told to “go home and spend time with her kids” and passed away at home three days after receiving her final diagnosis, leaving behind her husband and three children, aged one, two and nine.
Manchester Evening News reports she met her husband, Mike, while they were working at the same hospital he claims “failed her”. Devastated Mikebelieves if Laura had been seen by her GP in person, she would have been diagnosed sooner.
He said: “We could have had more time with my wife. Not three days. They failed her.” The widowed dad, from Manchester and who works as a porter for Pilgrim’s Hospital in Lincolnshire.
And he is now asking the government to mandate in-person doctor’s appointments. An online petition, started by a family friend, has already gathered more than 13,700 signatures.
He said: “She was never given the opportunity to see them face to face. If she had, they would have seen how much pain she was in. They would have sent her straight to A&E or asked for her to have bloods and scans done.
“I’m not saying she might have lived, but could we have had more time with her? Could they have started her on chemo so we could have six more months? We’ll never know. We’ve had that opportunity taken away from us.”
According to Mike, Laura first became seriously ill in October 2023, with pain in her abdominal region and blood in her stool. He remembers a brief phone call with her GP at Stickney Surgery resulted in the endometriosis diagnosis.
She was prescribed pain medication, which kept her going until mid-December, when she collapsed at her work as a housekeeper at Pilgrim’s.
He said: “I picked her up and took her straight to the doctors. We were sent to urgent care. She got poorlier and poorlier and was given morphine.
“By the time they called her name, the morphine had kicked in and she was in less pain. And the doctor [who knew about her endometriosis diagnosis] told her ‘there’s no point in seeing you because your [GP] is dealing with you’. That was it.”
Laura’s condition continued to deteriorate, but it took another visit to A&E and several more weeks of waiting before doctors discovered lesions on her liver through a CT scan in early January, according to a medical transcript.
But it wasn’t until mid-January that doctors started to suspect cancer. Laura’s final prognosis was given on February 2 – more than three months after she first complained of the pain.
Mike didn’t have the words to describe how difficult it was to lose his wife, but agreed it was ‘incredibly difficult’. The family spent Laura’s last days on a long-awaited holiday to Centre Parcs, but the mum-of-three’s condition turned on their way home.
“When we got her in, I lay down on the bed next to her,” Mike said. “We both fell asleep like that, and then her sister woke me up a few hours later and told me she was gone.
“What was the worst for me was the kids coming down the next day and finding mum’s not there. I had to tell the nine-year-old her mum had gone up in the sky with the angels. She just broke down.”
The family travels to Gorton to visit Laura’s grave twice a month and has special traditions to ‘keep her memory alive’. But ‘getting the answers’ is what has kept Mike going the most since his wife’s death.
“I just want someone to put their hands up and say ‘yes, we failed your wife. We will make sure this never happens to anyone else,” he said, adding that he’d had ‘nothing but excuses’ from Pilgrim’s Hospital and Stickney Surgery.
The lack of an inquest means Mike isn’t certain what cancer Laura had. He says he ‘hadn’t been aware’ that an inquest was an option but that he made multiple complaints to the chief executive of the hospital.
A spokesperson for the United Lincolnshire Hospitals Trust, which runs both Pilgrim Hospital and Stickney Surgery, said: “We would again like to offer our deepest condolences to Laura’s family.
“We are unable to comment on individual cases, but will continue to speak to the family about their concerns as appropriate.” Mike said he is determined to bring about change.
He said he has had messages of support from ‘thousands of people’. He said: “The government needs to know. I’ve had so many messages of people whose loved ones were misdiagnosed over the phone. It’s got to stop. People have died.”
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