Teacher hopes to warn others after misdiagnosis at 27

A YOUNG teacher whose breast cancer went undiagnosed at one of the country’s leading hospitals has told her story in the hope of encouraging other women with symptoms to insist on thorough tests.

Tricia McCarthy, now 29, had to have a mastectomy last year after the belated discovery that she had an aggressive tumour which had already spread to her lymph nodes.

Yet eight months earlier the Co Cork-born art teacher had been sent home from St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin without a biopsy because doctors there believed the lump she had found in her left breast to be benign.