Two victims wrongly diagnosed: Debbie thought she was going to die: Nieka's cancer was milder than she had feared
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Your support makes all the difference.THE DESPAIR was absolute. Debbie Leary, then a lively and athletic 12-year-old, was warned of a possible leg amputation.
It would be the last chance to save her life from bone cancer, diagnosed at Birmingham's Royal Orthopaedic Hospital.
She had already undergone chemotherapy, which made her hair fall out, and had missed six months of school. Her parents were coming to terms with the fact that she would die.
The diagnosis was wrong. Debbie, from Blackpool, Lancashire, had suffered a mild arthritic injury in a school sports day fall.
'Two years ago doctors you should be able to trust told us she was dying. They told us that they might have to amputate her legs as one of the only ways to save her,' said her father, Roy Leary.
'Can you imagine how we would feel now if that amputation had gone ahead - for what turned out to be no reason at all. How much trust can we place in doctors now?'
Debbie, now 14, and on holiday in the West Country, is looking forward to going back to school next week.
Mr Leary, 45, added: 'Debbie is coping well enough but she will never forget what she had to go through.
'We still don't know what side-effects her incorrect treatment may have caused. We don't know whether she will be able to have children.'
When told of the mistake, Debbie showed the depth of her fears: 'It was terrible. I thought I was going to die and I would never see Mum or Dad or my friends again. I thought I would never run any more.'
Nieka Chetwyn, eight, another child to be wrongly diagnosed, is undergoing her fifteenth session of chemotherapy at the Royal Manchester Children's Hospital.
Phil Chetwyn, her father, said the family, which lives in Prestwich, Manchester, feared that she has been given stronger treatment than needed for a milder cancer than the one originally diagnosed.
They were told in September that she was suffering from a rare, severe type of cancer in her right leg. But later it was found she had a slightly milder form. A Birmingham consultant told Mr Chetwyn and his wife, Karen, that there had been a 'major inaccuracy'.
'The Birmingham consultant said the treatment for the conditions was virtually the same,' Mr Chetwyn said. 'But frankly, after all that's happened, I am not sure I trust what they're saying.'
(Photograph omitted)
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