B.C. woman gets surgery in U.S., says wait times at home could have cost her life

Peritoneal carcinomatosis is caused by a primary cancer that has spread throughout the abdomen. It is rare but also requires a specific treatment plan in most cases.

Allison Ducluzeau has just returned from a dream trip to Hawaii where she married the love of her life on the beach. But it was a wedding she couldn’t even imagine earlier this year.

It all started last year at Thanksgiving when Ducluzeau said she started to feel pain in her abdomen. She chalked it up to eating too much but after the pain persisted for a few weeks, she thought she should go and see her family doctor. She started doing tests, an ultrasound, and a CT scan, but she said everything would take weeks to get an appointment.

“In November, I ended up at emergency because the pain was just getting progressively worse,” she said. “I didn’t get to sleep one night and I woke up my now husband and said, I think we better go to emergency. So we did. And when I was there, I got a CT scan or I was booked for one the next day and the results of the CT scan indicated it looked like it might be something called peritoneal carcinomatosis, which is abdominal cancer.”

It is caused by a primary cancer that has spread throughout the abdomen but it needed to be confirmed with a CT-guided biopsy. She got one in early December but the results were inconclusive due to the small sample size. When she got another one and those results showed she had stage 4 peritoneal carcinomatosis, her doctor referred her to the BC Cancer Agency.

Ducluzeau said her family doctor told her that with this type of cancer, they usually do a procedure called HIPEC, which involves delivering high doses of chemotherapy into the abdomen to kill the cancer cells. But when she saw the consulting surgeon at the BC Cancer Agency in January, she said she was told she was not a candidate for surgery.

“Chemotherapy is not very effective with this type of cancer,” Ducluzeau said the surgeon told her. “It only works in about 50 per cent of the cases to slow it down. And you have a life span of what looks like to be two months to two years. And I suggest you talk to your family, get your affairs in order, talk to them about your wishes, which was indicating, you know, whether you want to have medically assisted dying or not.”

Ducluzeau said she was floored by the news and she had to tell her kids that night.

“That was honestly the worst day of my life,” she said. “Telling them, oh, it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Just seeing how upset they were and having lost my own mum just a short while prior to that and knowing what it was like, like going through life without a mother.”