Completely incompetent
I feel the need to let you know about the dangerous and inappropriate treatment my wife was subjected to at IEO.
Our first experience was for an elective full body MRI. The technician did not give my wife property hearing protection, and did not carefully fit the earmuffs on her. Because of this, the MRI was very painful and loud and when she got out her ear was very painful and ringing. She told the technician that the ear protection wasn't adequate and that they should supply in-ear plugs. It was only then that he showed her, in a separate room, the container with those ear plugs and condescendingly handed her a fistfull of them. Since then she has had constant and very loud ringing and clicking in her ears, which has made her cry in distress on many occasions since. When we emailed the radiology department to explain this and ask for advice, and followed up, we got zero response.
We also visited IEO in order to get a fine needle biopsy to look for primary breast lymphoma recurrence (on the recommendation from two of the top oncologists specializing in breast lymphoma). We were told we must see one of IEO’s breast specialists to get approval and he could refer us to a radiologist who would also decide if the biopsy was necessary. So we showed him my wife's recent MRI and ultrasound images, and despite having those, and despite lymphoma not being something you can feel, he insisted on doing a manual touch breast exam.
I witnessed the breast exam, which nearly left my wife in tears. Not only was it very long and drawn out, he used both hands to squeeze my wife's breasts and nipples from both in front and from behind her, and he repeatedly pressed hard on the painful area. He ended the exam by pressing the outside of her breasts so that they created cleavage, then quickly releasing, as a teenage boy might do. My wife said she'd never had an exam like that before and it felt extremely inappropriate and humiliating. After asking us a series of unrelated personal questions such as where we're from and what we do for a living, he told us he'd talk to the radiologist and tell him to do the lymphoma biopsy.
We saw the radiologist hours later, and he made it clear that the doctor had not spoken to him. He said that in his opinion there's no chance my wife could have lymphoma. This was dangerous because, as he should know, the only way to rule out lymphoma is via a biopsy. We insisted and he made it clear that he was putting in his notes for the lab that he doesn't think the biopsy is necessary or that anything would be found. Even when my wife showed him the study from MSKCC in NYC which explains that there's 35% recurrence, he said that he is an expert and since he's never personally seen recurrence, that means there is none, and he doesn't trust studies. The man with the needle used a fast digging and pumping method of extracting the liquid, instead of keeping the needle still and slowly removing the liquid area, which made the sample have blood in it and risked spreading any cancer cells.
Later, we got a notice via email that we are due a partial refund because the biopsy type was changed. When we got the results, we saw that they looked for a regular breast cancer tumor marker and not lymphoma. When we asked if they looked for lymphoma they said yes, and that it was negative. When we asked again, for specifically which type of cells they looked for, we were told that there were zero cells in the sample so there was nothing to look for. This is obviously absurd, and dangerous that they told us that it was negative for lymphoma when they didn’t even look for lymphoma.
We sent this complaint to their ethics committee and several people high up at IEO and the only response we got was from their PR department (and obviously their publicist was useless) gaslighting us and offering zero help.