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‘I stopped going out because I had MRSA’
Breast cancer patient speaks of nightmare after chance diagnosis
WHEN 75-year-old Patricia Quaill was diagnosed with breast cancer last summer, she was determined to fight it with her usual vigour.
She was admitted to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead for a complete mastectomy last August, and planned to use complementary therapies offered by charity Cancerkin to aid her recovery.
But she had not banked on contracting the hospital superbug MRSA. Nor had she expected to discover such a distressing diagnosis by chance.
Mrs Quaill said that in December she felt as if she had flu. “They took swabs when I went back to the breast clinic and they called me that night to tell me to pick up a prescription,” she added. “It was only when I read it on my way to the pharmacy that I discovered it was MRSA.
“I couldn’t believe it. Nobody had told me. I didn’t know what to do.”
She had MRSA in her groin, nose and wound area.
The hospital’s infection control department reassured her that she should lead a normal life.
She said: “It has been so confusing. The infection control nurse was telling me not to worry, that I could just go on as normal. But when the nurse at the chest clinic didn’t want to weigh me and I couldn’t attend the appointment for a prosthetic breast in case of contamination, I began to panic.”
Mrs Quaill began isolating herself at home, fearing she could infect other people. She was widowed in 2000 when her jazz pianist partner of 21 years, Iggy Quaill, died, and her two children live in Australia.
“I was so worried I would infect some poor child that I stopped going out,” she said. “I even spent Christmas alone, in case I infected my friend’s grandchildren.”
Mrs Quaill believes she may have overreacted but she partly blames this on the way in which she discovered the diagnosis as well as the inconsistent information she received from hospital staff.
She now has the infection only in her groin and feels reassured since Royal Free chief executive Andrew Way responded to her concerns, telling her she need not cut herself off from family and friends.
She is keen to start yoga and reike classes at Cancerkin, which is based at the Royal Free Hospital, but not all its services are open to those infected with the superbug.
Cancerkin chief executive Gloria Freilich said: “We have people who are undergoing chemotherapy with very low resistance to infection. In yoga, people share mats and floor spaces. We do not have the same infection control regimes as the hospital.”
Mrs Quaill wants all MRSA patients to receive clear and consistent advice, so others don’t end up overreacting and cutting themselves off.
“I just want people to know exactly what precautions they have to take,” she said. |
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