On the morning of Feb. 2, 2010, Laverne Wilkinson was suddenly seized with chest pain while cleaning her apartment.
The single mom made her way by bus to Kings County Hospital, stricken with the fear she was having a heart attack. Doctors in the busy emergency department ordered an EKG and chest X-ray — and gave her a clean bill of health.
First-year resident Dr. James Willis assured Wilkinson that her tests were normal.
“You should take Motrin for pain, and follow up with your doctor,” Willis wrote on her chart.
He was dead wrong.
The chest X-ray, in fact, showed a suspicious, 2-centimeter nodule in Wilkinson’s right lung. The radiologist had recommended in his written report that Wilkinson have a
followup X-ray in three months, and if “clinical concern warrants, a CT scan is suggested.”
But Wilkinson was never given this information. Not that winter day in 2010. Not during two years of followup clinic appointments, during which she complained of a chronic cough. Not from her primary care clinic doctors at Kings County.
When Wilkinson returned to the ER in spring 2012 — wheezing and short of breath — a new chest X-ray was taken. It showed the nodule was cancerous, had more than doubled in size and spread to her left lung.
Now the diagnosis was Stage 4 lung cancer — and it had metastasized to her liver, spine and brain.
As Wilkinson’s lung cancer galloped unchecked for more than two years, Kings County doctors botched her care, offering her cough medicines, inhalers and steroids in the blind belief that her ailments were caused by her longstanding asthma.
“I was shocked. I was told I had six months to a year to live,” the former home health aide told the Daily News in an emotional interview in her public housing apartment in Brooklyn.
Breaking down in tears as she spoke about her only child, a severely retarded and autistic 15-year-old daughter, Wilkinson sobbed, “She is going to be left without a mother. What is going to happen to my little girl?”
As if a diagnosis of terminal metastatic cancer wasn’t horrible enough, there was one more bombshell to be dropped on Wilkinson — she probably could have been cured.
Dr. Gary Briefel, the attending physician on call when Wilkinson was in the hospital in May 2012, broke the stunning news to her about the findings on the February 2010 chest X-ray, and that she had a chance to live.
