Woman at N.L. inquiry wants answers for her dead sister

The sister of a cancer patient told a provincial inquiry she wants someone to take responsibility for her sister's flawed hormone receptor tests.

Patricia Goobie — from Queen's Cove, near Clarenville — told the commission of inquiry into faulty hormone receptor tests that she promised her now-deceased sister that she would tell her story.

Goobie was also telling her own story — she and another sister are also breast cancer patients. All three were diagnosed at age 48.

Goobie's sister, Geraldine Avery, the one whose story she swore to bring to light, died in August 2006. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999 and had received inaccurate results from a hormone receptor test, used to determine the best course of treatment.

Goobie told the commission her sister had heard through the media more than three years ago that mistakes were being discovered in the work of the Eastern Health pathology lab, and retesting of breast cancer patients was being done.

She said when her sister went looking for the results of her own retesting, it took repeated phone calls and months of waiting to get an answer from her doctor.

"She shouldn't have to hear it on the phone," Goobie said of her sister's ordeal. "She had enough ... she had a son drowned at 18, she went through a lot of pain and sorrow. They should've made an appointment to tell her, not on the phone."

Goobie's own breast cancer treatment test results were accurate.

Like all other witnesses called to testify at the commission so far, Goobie said no one from Eastern Health had ever apologized to her family for the way they were treated by the health authority. She said she wants someone to accept responsibility for the hundreds of botched tests and for the way the authority treated patients.

Throughout Goobie's testimony, Louise Jones, interim CEO of Eastern Health, listened in the makeshift hearing room.

After Goobie spoke, Jones faced reporters from the press gallery. She said she feels it is not the time for apologies, but a time to listen.

"What would [sorry] mean, if we don't hear their stories?"

Jones conceded Eastern Health could have handled the communications side of the misdiagnoses differently.

Thursday was the second day of witness testimony at the Commission of Inquiry into faulty hormone receptor testing, headed by Justice Margaret Cameron. The inquiry will investigate why 383 breast cancer patients' hormone receptor tests were done incorrectly.