BELIZE CITY, Thurs. July 25, 2019– A Belize City man called a media briefing in front of the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital yesterday to announce that he is planning to sue the hospital for a misdiagnosis of his wife’s cancer that led to her death.

The KHMH responded by issuing a press release in which it explained that the claim is being reviewed by the KHMH legal counsel.

Floyd Reneau, 53, is claiming that his wife, Irma Samuels Reneau, 54, died as a consequence of the negligence of the doctors at the KHMH, where she was treated in 2017, when she first fell ill.

Reneau is alleging that, for a period of about a year and a half after his wife first fell ill, the KHMH failed to disclose the results of a biopsy which would have indicated the cause of her illness.

Reneau told reporters that his wife was hospitalized at the KHMH on November 29, 2017 for a common obstruction in the stomach, and after a doctor had evaluated her, it was decided that she should be turned over to a specialist.

“She went into the surgical procedure from around 12:00 a.m. until about 5:30 the following morning, and the doctor exit the emergency room stating that she is okay, she is fixed up,” Reneau explained.

Reneau said that the hospital made an appointment for a follow-up visit two weeks after she was released from the hospital. The doctor who was supposed to see his wife on the follow-up visit was not in when she went back to the hospital on the follow-up visit, said Reneau.

“They stated they are going to call us back to give us a new appointment, and that was not done. I took my wife back home, I start treating her, feeding her healthy food, she gained her energy back, she gained her weight back, we were still waiting for a copy of the biopsy because they took a mass from her stomach; what was the content of the mass, we don’t know, so we were still trying to figure it out, so we kept coming back, to no avail,” Reneau said.

Reneau said that six months later his wife got sick again; it was June 23, 2018, and she was rushed back to the KHMH.

“When she got there, the doctors did not have a file on her, they didn’t have any information on her, two of the doctors kept tracking down the physician and he stated he didn’t remember giving her the surgery and I said ‘yes, you did.’ They start treating her, they decided to do a new procedure of doing a new biopsy, so a biopsy was taken; I privately took it to Belmopan to be tested, and in two weeks, the results came back negative.

“I said it was not concrete, something is not right, she is getting sick again, she is not looking like the person she was, so we keep coming back here, no response,” Reneau said.

When his wife got sick again on November 18, Reneau said, he took her back to the KHMH, and “it was the same procedure, CATscan, this that, we not getting no answers.”

He then explained, “Now they decided they want to give her a quick-fix, which is a colostomy bag. I said ‘why does she need a colostomy bag if she is still using the restroom’; meanwhile, she is losing blood. Every two weeks she has to get a blood transfusion, so we sat down and talk about it, and I decided to take her to the US.

“She was taken to the US on December 1, 2018. She went into the hospital December 2. In 72 hours she was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. This facility knew she had pre-cancer.”

Reneau referred to the extended period of time that passed after his wife had taken a biopsy on November 29, 2017. The results came back on August 16, 2018, but they did not receive the results until February. Reneau referred to that extensive delay —15 months. It was a lengthy period during which the disease probably progressed, and during which lifesaving measures could have been taken.

Reneau added, “They see pre-cancer, the doctor saw this, if the doctor saw this and you are a chief surgeon, why didn’t you refer to the patient right away what you saw, this should have been an urgent care.

“My wife passed away on June 23 this year, exactly one month and one day, there is no way that a living individual should have died like that. I watch her suffer, I watch her in the pain, I watch her lose all the weight. If these people did their jobs, she could have been here, because if you saw pre-cancer, what is your next move, over to an oncologist; if the cancer does not shrink, it will spread. We did not know all this, so that is what happened, it came back as a monster.”