Amelia has been fighting cancer for almost two years, but also against the Canarian Health Service, for the delay in tests that can be a matter of life or death. She suffered it when she was waiting for the diagnosis of her illness, which aggravated her condition, and she is suffering it again now, with the revision controls.
“It's like living with a sword of Damocles hanging over your head. Every three months, you don't know if it will have advanced, if it will have reproduced... And if they delay it, they play with the reaction time, which is extremely important”, she denounces, pointing out that she has decided to raise her voice for herself, “but also for all patients”.
In addition to making her case public, Amelia has also filed a new complaint with the Ministry of Health of the Government of the Canary Islands. “I am an oncology patient in treatment for 21 months and every three months a control CT scan is requested by the Oncology service. It has been exactly 42 days since mine was requested, and I have not been given an appointment to date, so they are considerably delayed. Control CT scans are vital for cancer patients. Literally vital. It is unforgivable that this happens again!”, she says in her letter, registered on September 22.
According to her, the response she had been given at the Hospital is that in August “an accumulation has formed due to the holidays”, but her response is resounding: “Cancer does not take holidays”. This Thursday, the waiting time she has accumulated since the test was requested is already 49 days.
Months of waiting and detected in grade three
For Amelia, the ordeal began during the pandemic. “At that time, many people died because diagnostic tests were not done or were done in small quantities”, she says. In her case, she claims that it meant that her illness worsened, and it was detected in grade three.
According to her, from the time her pulmonologist “suspected and saw something in an X-ray” until she had the first CT scan, “two and a half months” passed. There they gave her the diagnosis, lung cancer, but she needed a complementary test in Gran Canaria, a PET CT scan, which continued to prolong the wait.
“It was when the Filomena event happened, that flights from Madrid were not arriving, and they said that the material they needed was not arriving”. That storm affected the Peninsula for about 6 days, in January 2022, but her test claims that it took two more months to arrive.
During that time, she began to receive treatment, although she regrets that it was not with the precision that the complementary test would have provided. “They had put me on a blind treatment, to prevent it from spreading further. They didn't know the extent of the disease, because I was missing that test”, she says.
Afterwards, she claims that this has had consequences. “The treatment worked, but it didn't eradicate it. And with the indicated treatment it would have been eradicated”, she says. Specifically, she points out that when the complete diagnosis arrived, they told her that she should have received radiotherapy and chemotherapy from the beginning. However, the first chemo that was applied to her prevented her from receiving radio afterwards.
“Now I am condemned to receive chemotherapy in order to survive”, she questions, pointing out that she has been receiving it for almost 19 months, “when it could have been eradicated from the beginning”.
In any case, she celebrates that the cancer is “in remission”, although always with the fear that it will reappear. Hence the importance of periodic check-ups, in which she denounces that it is the Health Service itself that does not meet the deadlines stipulated by health professionals.