Cancer patient can't sleep since learning of diluted drugs

Breast cancer patient Lisa Bourque has had many sleepless nights since receiving a letter from the Saint John Regional Hospital, saying she had received watered-down chemotherapy drugs. (CTV Atlantic)

A New Brunswick breast cancer patient says she hasn't been able to sleep after learning she received watered-down chemotherapy treatments.

Lisa Bourque is among 186 patients who received diluted chemotherapy drugs at the Saint John Regional Hospital.

“They told me they were going to hit me with all they had but they also told me that this disease is 10 per cent illness and 90 per cent mental, so you try to get yourself in that mental place where you believe that everything they’re doing is going to work,” says the St. George resident.

“But then they come at you and tell you somebody with your medication has done you wrong and they don’t know what the repercussions are going to be.”

In some cases, patients only received 80 per cent of the medication they were supposed to.

“There’s nothing good that can be said about chemotherapy. Anybody who’s lived it knows,” says Bourque.

“Then they tell me, well, somewhere between three and 20 per cent less of the drug I was supposed to get, I didn’t.”

Health officials in New Brunswick and Ontario are working together to determine how more than 1,100 patients in the two provinces were given the diluted chemotherapy drugs over the span of a year.

“What matters here is getting the right answer and dealing with it as quickly as possible and making sure these types of regrettable things don’t happen again,” says New Brunswick Health Minister Ted Flemming.

The affected hospitals all used Marchese Hospital Solutions to prepare the drugs.

There was too much saline added to the bags of chemotherapy medications -- diluting the prescribed drug concentrations by three to 20 per cent.

The supplier has suggested that the problem wasn't how the drugs were prepared, but how they were administered at the hospitals.

Doctors aren’t certain if there will be a long-term impact on the patients who received the diluted drugs because the situation is so unusual; there are no studies to say whether the patients’ chances of recovery have been compromised.

Bourque is now receiving radiation treatments but admits questions surrounding her chemotherapy treatments are weighing heavily upon her.

“I had myself in a good frame of mind, but ask me how many sleepless nights there have been since they told me about this screw-up, because every one of them has been a sleepless night.”

With files from CTV Atlantic's Mike Cameron and The Canadian Press