Cancer mum to get £10,000 pay out

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A mother given months to live after a hospital failed to diagnose her skin cancer has been given an emergency £10,000 pay-out by health chiefs.

Tara Jones, 26, of Treorchy in the Rhondda, has been paid the money by Cwm Taf NHS Trust so that she can make the most of her time with her children.

She was given the all-clear in 2005 but new tests showed a removed mole was malignant and the cancer had spread.

The trust said it was involved in a claim over a delay in diagnosis.

Ms Jones is now planning a dream holiday with children Tyler, six, and Lowis, three, so that they will have good memories of their mother.

Ms Jones said: "I just want them to be so happy in the time we have together. I just don't know how they will manage without me.

"I have never spent a day apart from them. I love them so much - they are my everything.

"There are so many things I want to do with my children - I would love to take them to New York and stay in the big hotel from the film Home Alone and take them to a big toy shop.

"I would love to go to Venice and sail on a gondola. I'd like to buy a nice house with a big garden and treehouse for the children.

"I'm glad I've had the money - I will make the most of every day."

Ms Jones had been given the all-clear by the Royal Glamorgan Hospital in Llantrisant in 2005 after a mole had been removed from her back.

She said the mole had been sent away for tests and a week later she was told it was harmless.

But a friend whose mother died of cancer recognised some of her symptoms and insisted she get a second opinion.

She said she was becoming unwell, was losing weight and had a lump under her arm the size of a golf ball.

After further tests Ms Jones was told the mole they had removed three years before was a melanoma.

Ms Jones said: "He (the doctor) told me there had been a terrible mistake. The mole I'd had removed in 2005 had been cancerous all along," she said.

"I started screaming for Chris (her partner) - in a way I knew, I knew that it was off the mole in my back that the cancer had spread because I had been complaining about it from the time they told me.

"So they confirmed the fears I already had I think - that I had had it for such a long time and the damage it has done in that amount of time."

Ms Jones said she was hoping to live long enough to see her two children - Tyler, six, and Lowis, three - open their Christmas presents this year.

"I will never see them grow up, their first day at comprehensive school, their first boyfriends and girlfriends," she said.

I started screaming for Chris - in a way I knew, I knew that it was off the mole in my back Tara Jones

"I am going to miss it all. It's just too unbearable to think about.

"Well it's heartbreaking really isn't it? I don't know how long I have got left to live through somebody else's mistake - I hope for years - but when I ask they just tell me to take my life each month as it comes.

"But how did you explain that - worst of all how do you explain that to the kids really, how do you tell the kids that?"

Ms Jones has appointed a solicitor Stephen Webber to fight a case of medical negligence.

He said: "I can confirm Tara has received an interim payment of £10,000 from Cwm Taf Trust. I will continue to act on her behalf regarding her tragic case.

"It's a payment we sought because of the particular circumstances of Tara's case. Because of the poor prognosis we made a request for an interim payment in the first instance and the trust agreed."

A statement from Cwm Taf NHS Trust, which runs the hospital, said: "We are able to confirm the trust's involvement in a claim in the delay of diagnosis of cancer.

"But unfortunately the trust is bound by constraints of confidentiality and cannot comment further at this time."