The husband of a 54-year-old teacher reported a case of medical malpractice to the press: his wife, Alessandra Taddei, had a cancer to the brain and the doctors treated her with paracetamol. She had gone to the emergency room three times. In Repubblica, the man said that his wife often repeated to him that he felt like a pincer was holding her head. Her severe pain had forced her to go to the emergency room of the Dea di Verbania three times, but she had always been sent back home with the instruction to take Tachipirina. The last time her husband had also called the carabinieri: “I was desperate, at least the third time they would have had to deepen with more specific exams. My wife had a large brain tumor and was sent home diagnosed with headache and acetaminophen. “
Because he didn’t file a complaint
Alessandra, a teacher of mathematics and science at the Quasimodo junior high school in Verbania, died last August 20, after a year of ordeal. Now her husband, Francesco Costa, has decided to tell what happened, so that doctors are led to diagnose with less lightness. Costa wonders in what spirit he will be able to return to an emergency room, where he felt humiliated and not taken into consideration. The man decided not to file a complaint with the police because his wife would not have been saved anyway, but if the doctors had investigated her symptoms from the beginning, he would have had answers and would have suffered less. Instead, husband and wife had to go to the San Raffaele hospital in Milan to get the answers to their questions.
The headache did not go away
It all began on September 13, 2021. The man recalled:“My wife has always suffered from headaches, that evening she was in severe pain. That night at 3.07 we went to the emergency room. She was discharged at 4.44. History: Headache without aura, present for years and worsening this night. They prescribed drops and paracetamol. The neurological examination said lucid and oriented ”. She was discharged but the following afternoon she returned to the hospital in an ambulance because the pain was still persistent. She was then sent home the same evening with anamnesis “Headache crisis in migraine patient”, more paracetamol 1000 in case of need. Back in her home, the 54-year-old continued to feel bad and could not get out of bed due to a severe headache. On 21 September they called 118 again and at 2.38pm the woman returned for the third time to the emergency room and was discharged after only two hours with the same medical history. She couldn’t stand up.
The tragic verdict
At that point Costa asked the medical staff to investigate the situation with diagnostic tests. “They postponed until September 25, when we already had an appointment for an MRI after going to a neurologist. So I decided to go to the carabinieri in Intra who listened to me, I almost cried as I told what was happening “, said the woman’s husband. Later she returned to the hospital asking to speak to a doctor: “When he arrived I asked him who I was talking to, he answered only by telling me his name and inviting me to report him, he said“ report me, please report me ”, slamming the door behind me”. In the late afternoon the patient was discharged from the emergency room for the third time and he had to go home in a wheelchair because he could not walk.
On 24 September she entered the San Raffaele in Milan in orange code. After some tests, including a CT scan, the tragic verdict: a bulky mass pressed against the brain, it was a tumor. After undergoing surgery she underwent radiation therapy but the tumor had returned. On August 20, Taddei lost her battle against cancer. “I wonder why no one, seeing that it was a suspicious case, didn’t send my wife to Domodossola or Novara where there is neurology, I know my wife wouldn’t have been saved but at least she wouldn’t have suffered those extra days until we had to go in Lombardy “the husband now wonders.