Woman died after medics missed cancer

She just wanted a picket fence and babies

CARYS MONTEATH/The Press

TOO LATE: Margaret and Cherie McKnight with a photo of Sacha, their daughter and sister who died after doctors failed to diagnose her stomach cancer until it was too late.

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Doctors  put the crippling stomach pains that plagued Sacha McKnight for almost a year down to a bad case of constipation, or endometriosis.

Instead, a cancerous tumour was growing inside her.

Sacha, 20, died of a rare gastrointestinal cancer on December 30 last year - almost a year, and at least 10 visits to either her GP or Christchurch Hospital emergency department, after she first complained of severe stomach pains.

This week her mother, Margaret McKnight, complained to the health and disability commissioner about the care her daughter received from physicians during the last year of her life.

"She'd [Sacha] saved $25,000 and was going to buy her first house this year. She wanted the white picket fence and the babies but that was taken away from her," Mrs McKnight said. "I don't want to go hospital- or doctor-bashing ... but people need to know her story.

"They need to push if they are not happy with the treatment they are getting from the doctors because I wouldn't want any other family to have to suffer like us."

Mrs McKnight said she could not understand how medics failed to diagnose her daughter's condition over such a long period time and so many medical visits, even though it was rare.

Her daughter, a nursing student, first complained to their family doctor about stomach pains in January last year.

Between then and her diagnosis in November, Sacha visited her GP at least 10 times and went to the emergency department three times, the final time in an ambulance when she was admitted to hospital and given an ultrasound, which detected widespread cancer.

Forty days later she died at her family's Christchurch home.

"She was so caring and she always smiled, even toward the end," Mrs McKnight said. "She never cried about it because she didn't want us to be upset."

Sacha's GP is away at present so could not be contacted. A senior doctor from his clinic said he was sympathetic to the McKnights' grief and encouraged the family to get an independent assessment from the commissioner.

The doctor said in his 40 years of general practice he had never seen a gastrointestinal stromal tumour in someone so young.

Christchurch Hospital general manager Mark Leggett said a formal clinical review of Sacha's case was carried out, the results of which had been sent to the family.

In the letter, Christchurch District Health Board said Sacha's condition was rare and difficult to detect.

When she went to the emergency department it was believed she had constipation, endometriosis or coeliac disease - not life-threatening conditions and ones most appropriately treated by her GP.

Cancer Society medical director Chris Atkinson said cancer was uncommon in young people, particularly ones such as gastrointestinal stromal tumours.

In New Zealand, about 10 people a year were diagnosed with this form of cancer were diagnosed.

If caught early, it could be removed; otherwise it often spread to internal organs with fatal consequences, he said.