I thought I was very anxious after feeling unsteady on my feet… but the truth could have killed me

A mother of three was diagnosed with “bad anxiety” by a GP – before medics later discovered the terrifying truth.

Police officer Emma Capper, 39, says she was dizzy and “unsteady” on her legs for weeks – which turned out to be a potentially fatal illness. brain tumor.

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The mother of three says she feels let down by her doctor after failing to discover the cancer despite weeks of delay.

When she first sought treatment, medics diagnosed her with “very severe anxiety” and gave her beta-blockers for high blood pressure.

She says she has also been given anti-nausea medication over the phone for vertigo.

But her symptoms worsened and she started throwing up, so she chose to bypass her primary care physician and go straight to an emergency department.

Doctors there eventually invited her for a head scan, which revealed she had a “large growth” at the back of her head — later found to be cancerous.

Emma was then rushed to a specialist hospital where surgeons successfully removed the tumor eight days later.

But the mother thinks she might have suffered months ago if she had accepted the diagnosis from her local clinic, and now needs new tests to see if the cancer has spread.

She said: “If I hadn’t gone to the emergency room that day, I would still feel so unwell.

“I don’t know how I managed to go to work every day. Until my head was scanned, it was not possible to know if it was there or not.

“Unless the doctors referred me for a scan, this would never have ended.

“When I spoke to the doctors at the hospital, the next thing was seizures.

“I have now had to surrender my driver’s license because I am not considered safe to drive.”

Emma said she first called her clinic in Oldham, Greater Manchesterin May after feeling that something was wrong.

The mother who had beaten before breast cancersaid: “I had to rotate my whole body to be able to turn my head without it being really, really painful and I had this weird feeling.

“So I called the doctor to try and make an appointment. I got a call later that day, but it was from a nurse, not a doctor.

“She wrote me some tablets from that telephone consultation, anti-disease tablets, and invited me for an appointment the next day.”

Emma went to the operating room the next day, but again she was seen by a nurse rather than a GP, who she said had been misdiagnosed with “very severe anxiety”.

In the weeks that followed, Emma’s condition did not approve and she suspected her breast cancer had spread to her brain after checking her symptoms on the Internet.

She called her local GP again the following month, but was still unable to make an in-person appointment with a doctor, who instead prescribed her medication for vertigo over the phone.

A few days later, Emma started vomiting, so she went to a local emergency room after taking advice from her father, who is a nurse.

Doctors then gave her an emergency head scan, which revealed she had been drastically misdiagnosed for weeks.

“The CT scan had shown that there was a large growth in the back of my head,” she said.

Emma was rushed to Salford Royal Hospital and surgeons removed the tumor from her head eight days later. She will now undergo radiotherapy treatment.

But she’s still shocked that her primary care doctor hasn’t discovered the possible link between her breast cancer and brain tumor.

She said: “My reading shows that one of the most common sites of breast cancer is a secondary cancer of the brain, so if I understood that.

“So I just think it would have been a good idea to send me in for a scan.”

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