A Montreal woman who was told by health-care professionals that she was too young for breast cancer but later diagnosed with it, has died from the disease. Valerie Buchanan was 32 when she died at the end of February.
“I keep asking myself why anyone, but selfishly, why her?” Chris Scheepers, Buchanan’s husband told CTVNews.ca in a telephone interview. “She was a beautiful person. She was extremely driven, talented and positive. What really breaks me is our son won’t know the truly remarkable woman she was.”
Throughout 2020, Buchanan sought answers for a lump in her chest but had said she was reassured by multiple health-care professionals in Ottawa and Montreal that it was a benign cyst without sending her for imaging to confirm.
After 13 months, Buchanan eventually went to a private clinic and was diagnosed with Stage 3 triple-negative breast cancer – a biologically aggressive subtype of breast cancer. Just a few months later, she learned it was Stage 4.
I would blame this less on doctors and more on insurance providers and hospital administrators that deny certain tests.
Testing for a cancer diagnosis is FAR more expensive when the result is positive.
She died because the healthcare system around her would like to avoid paying for the treatment of her.
The wealthy controlling class in Canada have been destroying and hindering their un8versal Healthcare system in order to move in for profit nedical care. Canada has been letting them break their system and its costing lives and money.
It’s a thing everywhere that women are routinely told “it’s anxiety / depression” etc, and aren’t listened to. It takes years longer for women to receive diagnosis for anything. Advocate for the women in your life. Go to doctors appointments with them. Apparently if a man goes with them, they’ll, more likely be listened to, team up with someone who won’t take no for an answer. It’s not just the car dealerships that women face issues, it’s everywhere.
I agree but as a healthcare worker it’s across the board, if you’re a woman, a minority, a blue collar worker, a poor person, the Canadian heath industry has increasingly brushed all of our issues under the rug as they cut more and more from healthcare
Its not just canadian healthcare.
in America its much the same way.
Doctors are over worked, nurses are under staffed, no one wants to deal with anything that cant be diagnosed and solved in 2 minutes with a hastily written prescription. Even worse if you are poor, not white, have chronic issues, etc.
Last time I changed doctors (which was before covid), It took me 5 fucking years to find a doctor that would take me… cause most of them wont even see potentially “problematic” patients.
An Ontario doctor killed my mother by refusing to refer her to a specialist until the pain swallowing became so great she was starving to death. It was esophageal cancer and despite a traumatic surgery, she could not be saved.
I heard good things about healthcare in Canada. I come from a country that also has universal healthcare, but doctors are paid measly wages and results are what you pay for. 4-5 hours waits at emergency rooms, doctors and nurses refusing to do more than the bare minimum, or not event that, unless you give them a little “incentive”, etc, etc. So actually good doctors go to practice in private clinics or other countries, where they’re paid properly. I have lots of horror stories from the healthcare system in my native country.
But I thoght that Canada properly funds their healthcare system and this stuff wouldn’t happen.
But I thoght that Canada properly funds their healthcare system and this stuff wouldn’t happen.
Buddy, Canada has the second worst healthcare system among high income countries, behind only the shitstain that is the US system.
The system is so underfunded that wait times are abysmal and doctors/nurses leave in droves to avoid dealing with consequences of underfunding.
People believe all kinds of bullshit about Canadian healthcare. We have an awful healthcare system. I have had to forgo treatments because I couldn’t afford them. Many things aren’t covered under provincial healthcare plans, many ERs regularly suspend service due to being shortstaffed (which has led to many deaths), we have more and more private health clinics that charge exorbitant fees for basic services, we have systemic discrimination against women and racialized people, and we have relatively high rates of medical bankruptcy. The whole system is fucked.
God, it’s so fucked that somehow your system is better than ours (USA) in most cases and certainly general affordability and it’s still that bad.
Fucking wild. I suppose like everything else it’s a spectrum for people’s experiences and depends on the province and local govt.
The arrogance of some doctors can be scary. I used to be a clinical genetic counselor, a job specifically designed to focus on working with doctors as a genetics specialist so that they don’t need to know all the intricacies of that on top of everything else. Most doctors I worked with hated me, and saw me as a distraction from work they could handle on their own.
One time a doctor went over my head to order a genetic test for a patient who had a very strong family history of breast cancer. He didn’t refer her for a genetic counseling session, which was the protocol so that we could explain to her her own risk and the potential positive result, and give her the option to make an informed choice about whether or not she wanted testing at all. He just offered her the test out of the blue and, not really knowing what it meant, she just accepted by default. Not only did she test positive for a BRCA1 mutation, increasing her lifetime risk of developing breast cancer to over 90%, but the doctor incorrectly interpreted the results of the test, and believed she tested positive for breast cancer itself.
I only learned about the patient because the doctor mentioned her nonchalantly during a review meeting, and I had to correct him about the results of the test and convince him to refer her to me. I think the only reason he agreed was because he was put on the spot in front of the whole oncology department. I was lucky that the doctor hadn’t yet incorrectly reported to the patient that she had breast cancer, but I still had to inform this woman, who barely understood why she was here, that she’ll likely want to start scheduling yearly mammograms right now, or even consider a mastectomy, while she was still in college. That was the most difficult day of my short time in the field, and a big reason for why I ultimately left.
You know what they call the worst doctor in the class right? Doctor.
From the few people in my vicinity that went to med school (not US), not a lot of emphasis is put on the human side of medecine.
If the worst doctor in the class is good enough to get a license and has great bedside manners, I’d rather have him than a better doctor with a terrible attitude
I am confused. Outside of not following the rules and reading the test results incorrectly, it sounds as if him giving her the test was a positive thing? Isn’t it good that this was caught early? Sorry, maybe it’s how I am reading it, but you sound upset that she even received this diagnosis. I also get that the end doesn’t justify the means, but it sounds like catching this early can really help her life long-term.
Oh, no, the diagnosis isn’t the bad thing, the process by which the patient received it is the bad thing. Genetic testing is a big decision, since it not only affects the patient’s entire life, but also the lives of their family members. It’s not something you want the patent to suddenly be informed of out of the blue without even fully understanding that they were being tested in the first place. This patient had no time to prepare for the possibility that she could have a high lifetime cancer risk, and didn’t even know what that would mean until she already had the result.
This woman went from a normal college student with normal worries to someone who now has to worry about whether or not she wants to risk keeping her breast tissue to maybe one day breastfeed a baby, or simply feel like herself when she looks in the mirror. She has to think about whether she wants to have kids at all because they’d have a 50% chance of inheriting the same mutation. Every time she touches her own breasts for the rest of her life she’s going to be scared that she feels a lump.
It’s good that she got a diagnosis, but a lot of people choose not to, or at least choose to have it at a time when they’re ready to focus on it, and this woman was denied that. She could have simply gotten more mammograms without testing right now, for example, because her family history put her in higher risk in its own. She wasn’t even given a heads up that she might be thrust into this reality - the doctor was thinking about her physical well-being, but ignored her mental well-being. That’s what the genetic counselors are supposed to be there for, but he ignored us, and the patent suffered for it. A woman walked into my office thinking everything was fine, and walked out with a world of worries on her shoulders.
This makes sense! Thank you for explaining. As someone who works in the medical world, but in IT, I know of this position. Where I work they are called genetic counselors and are very sought after. So much so they were the first department to ever allow remote work because it was impossible to find a team local. I wanna say half the staff worked out of Canada as well. I knew the jist of what they did, but this shines even more light on it.
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That’s… not true, at least not in 2017 when this happened. Yes, a double mastectomy is an available option, and is the one most commonly taken due to the high risk, but another option, at least in the US at the time, is to have yearly mammograms. Often women want to keep their breasts until they have children and get through breastfeeding, then have a double mastectomy as well as an oophorectomy due to the high ovarian cancer risk that also comes with a BRCA1 mutation. I haven’t kept up with recommendations since leaving the field in 2019, but at least back then, there were more than one option, and I’d be surprised if it’s been constricted to a forced double mastectomy since then.
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Ah, you’re talking about the news story. Sorry, since you replied to my comment, I thought you were talking about the story I shared, which is of a different person. The woman from the news story wasn’t diagnosed with a familial cancer condition like a BRCA mutation. Also, it’s important to note that while a double mastectomy would definitely be recommended in the case of a BRCA1 mutation, ultimately the patient obviously gets the final decision on what they go with. It’s important to offer it, of course, but it’s not something to be forced on a person, regardless of the benefits. People have more going on in their life than what a doctor sees in their office, and can sometimes have something of even greater importance going on at the moment. Treatment is always a discussion to have with the patient, not a decision made on their behalf.
What’s sad is how hard would it have been for just a single one of them to say “…but we should send you for an image just in case”
Any time my wife has been given the run around by doctors, I usually ask for her to schedule another appointment so I can be there, and I demand the doctors put notes, make something on the record that they SPECIFICALLY ARE DENYING TESTING and the reason behind it before I will leave.
So far it’s worked every time to get them to just do the goddamn test, take the fucking scan, or do some simple blood work.
Doctors like that are more afraid of malpractice suits than they are of killing a patient over negligence.
The first time it happened was because she had cholecystitis and the doctor was insisting she was too young to have any issues with it, but I was older and had already had my gallbladder removed over it several years before. So I knew the signs, I knew the feeling, and I had doctors from the same hospital ignore my symptoms. Once the demand for notes to be recorded, suddenly everyone is all for doing a simple scan and what do you know, her gallbladder is filled with sludge and stones, neither of which should be there, and it’s swelling. A week later it was out, but they wanted to wait 6 months “to wait and see if you’re still having discomfort”
To anyone who has never had gallstones, it’s like someone is taking a glowing hot knife and stabbing you from just above the stomach toward your spine. It’s “discomfort” the way giving birth is “mild pain”
Demand tests and demand records of test denials. Fear of lawsuits and losing licenses goes a lot further than “you’re a doctor who is supposed to help people get better” to some.
That can be effective in the US but would generally not work in Canada where malpractice suits are uncommon.
In Canada you may have better luck pursuing a complaint to the province’s licensing authority.
As a healthcare provider (HCP) I would generally try to dissuade patients from exaggerating or overstating. Most doctors and nurses have dealt with enough people that we have a good sense of when someone is exaggerating or even outright lying. Usually it is counterproductive and decreases the chance that your concern or complaint will be addressed appropriately.
I would advocate for centering the conversation on how symptoms have changed / affected your quality of life. A good HCP would make this part of the coversation but I know that not all of my colleagues do so, especially in light of corporate or governmental pressure to see as many patients in as fast as possible.
I feel/have _____ when I do _____ and I’m worried that it will continue, impairing my ability to _____ is a general approach.
The strange thing here is that in America there’s a better chance they might have found it earlier–if only because they’re gung-ho on testing because they can bill for it.
In America, you’re more likely to get the test ordered (for a myriad of reasons, billing is one, but also malpractice) but also to have it be denied by insurance.
In a country like Canada, the challenge would be getting the test ordered but once you do, the only question is when it can be done.
My wife had a lump in her breast at… I think 27. They sent her to imaging and took a biopsy, realized it was benign, removed it anyways because it was hurting. The parking tickets were our only cost. This should be the norm.
That absolutely should be the norm. There’s no good reason things can’t be this way in modern civilization.
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I disagree…
You shouldn’t have to pay for parking either.
Yes you should, it’s an incredibly privileged mindset to think that public space should be sacrificed so that you can conveniently and freely park your car
You’ve decided to interpret my comment in your own way.
There are many options for travel that would not require a car, if the infrastructure were in place, that would then allow people needing a space for a medical reason to have parking available.
No, you absolutely should not have to pay for parking either when you’re there for a medical reason.
Agreed, if she had insurance. And it didn’t get denied by AI.
I hate this place
Too young? When in the history of ever have diseases discriminated based on age?
Diseases are more common in certain demographics. It’s not a hard and fast rule but it’s factored into the differential diagnosis.
Honestly, all the time. Even some types of cancer can be more or less severe based on age. Obviously not in this case.
They should have told the tumor, it would have respected the rules for sure.
I would be beyond furious if this was my wife.
These people shouldn’t be allowed to practice medicine.
Even their doctors aren’t educated…
Where do you think Montreal is?
Probably assumed it was in the US lol
Yep, and its true if it weren’t a money maker like imaging they might find it difficult to get a proper diagnosis in the US, but I’m willing to bet the otherwise great healthcare systems in many developed nations still dismiss women’s health concerns with unfortunate regularity, even in 2025.
Dismissing women’s health concerns is a consequence of dismissing women, an issue no culture on earth has overcome.
Too true, and I do trust we will. Every new generation is socialized a bit differently than the last. Hopefully we’re passing along fewer of these biases to the next.
Not so certain about English speaking countries due to the manosphere and surge of conservatism / ‘traditional values’ among young men but we can hope.
Right after Monduoal and Monunal
I have a 22 year old friend who just got a double mastectomy because her biopsy came back positive.
Damn, that’s terrible. I hope they recover ok, i can’t imagine how traumatic their experience had been. Take good care of her ❤️
The big trauma was the lead up to the biopsy where she couldn’t get screened because she didn’t have money for it, and Planned Parenthood wasn’t willing to do the breast cancer screening for someone crossing state lines, and her home state had blocked all Planned Parenthood clinics because America is a conservative hellscape. She moved states, immediately got screened, was found to have breast cancer, got treated, and is honestly extremely relieved that the journey is over. Every so often she talks to my wife about a pic on instagram she found while she was boob shopping because she’s trying to decide what size fake boobs she wants
Like. You’re absolutely right it was terrifying and stressful, and in many ways continues to be, but the worst parts of the experience are over and she’s starting the journey of the best parts at this point
the worst parts of the experience are over and she’s starting the journey of the best parts at this point
I’m relieved to hear that. Sound like she’s got a good head on her shoulders, i wish her the best!
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Youth lowers the odds, yes, but that’s statistics not people. You still do the full work up if there are concerns.
Jesus fucking Christ
