Australian Father Wins Case Against GP After Cancer Was Misdiagnosed as Haemorrhoids

A Sydney father has won a negligence case against his GP after bowel cancer was initially attributed to haemorrhoids, with a judge finding the delay cost him almost five years of expected life.

Ross Peterkin, a personal trainer now in his early 40s, sued Dr Abram Tadros over the treatment he received in August 2022. He argued that symptoms including rectal bleeding, pain and other bowel problems should have prompted further investigation.

The NSW Supreme Court ruled that Dr Tadros breached his duty of care. Justice Gregory Sirtes said more thorough questioning and an appropriate referral would probably have resulted in a diagnosis by February 2023.

However, the judgment also assigned some responsibility to Mr Peterkin, in an unusual finding that his own conduct contributed to the delay.

The court heard he did not mention his ongoing bowel symptoms during later medical appointments. He also waited 137 days to act after being referred to colorectal surgeon Dr Auerilius Hamilton in October 2023.

“Those failures contributed to the delay in diagnosis from February 2023 to May 2024,” Justice Sirtes said.

The judge determined that the delayed diagnosis reduced Mr Peterkin’s life expectancy from around February 2032 to approximately mid-2027 — a loss of about 4.75 years.

Hours before seeing Dr Tadros, Mr Peterkin described his worsening symptoms in Facebook messages to his wife, Kristy-Lee. The couple had been planning to have a second child.

“I am so f***ing uncomfortable. I can hardly concentrate. I am bloated too, so hopefully I am just constipated but [I will] have to change my diet if that is the case,” Mr Peterkin wrote.

A short time later, he added: “This is f***ed, I need to go to the toilet so badly nothing comes out.”

“I am actually starting to feel like s*** too.”

Earlier that day, Mr Peterkin told his wife he believed it was finally time to see a doctor about bowel issues he had experienced since contracting Covid.

Kristy-Lee urged him to act quickly, replying: “If theres [sic] blood I suggest sooner rather than later.”

At the consultation, Dr Tadros documented painful bowel movements and minimal rectal bleeding. After a visual examination, he diagnosed Mr Peterkin with haemorrhoids.

The GP did not perform a digital rectal examination. Instead, Mr Peterkin was prescribed a suppository, given an information leaflet about haemorrhoids and advised to return if the symptoms continued.

Justice Sirtes nevertheless rejected Dr Tadros’ evidence that he had clearly identified a haemorrhoid during the examination.

The judge found the consultation instead ‘focused on the haemorrhoid to the exclusion of the other symptoms’, adding that Dr Tadros ‘functionally ignored those symptoms’.

The court also rejected Dr Tadros’s evidence that he had offered Mr Peterkin a digital rectal examination and that the patient declined it.

Dr Tadros was not Mr Peterkin’s usual GP and Mr Peterkin failed to raise his continuing bowel problems during a series of subsequent medical appointments.

In October 2023, he returned to his usual GP, Dr Samira Etemad, seeking another prescription for haemorrhoid cream.

Dr Etemad took a full history, with Mr Peterkin reporting rectal bleeding several times a week for about 12 months.

She considered internal haemorrhoids, a polyp, inflammatory bowel disease and cancer among the possible causes and referred him to colorectal surgeon Dr Hamilton.

But by another appointment in February 2024, Mr Peterkin was still bleeding and had not made the specialist appointment.

He had also developed pressure in his anal area, prompting Dr Etemad to consider cancer likely, or at least one of the more probable diagnoses, and urged him to see Dr Hamilton ‘ASAP’.

Mr Peterkin finally saw Dr Hamilton in March and was initially recommended for a colonoscopy within 30 days.

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However, the hospital downgraded his priority, recording ‘no critical symptoms in a 40-year-old’.

Dr Hamilton sought an earlier procedure, citing pencil-shaped stools, rectal pain disturbing Mr Peterkin’s sleep and persistent tenesmus, the sensation of urgently needing to empty the bowels.

His case was upgraded and a colonoscopy followed 13 days later.

A digital examination revealed a hard mass about 10cm from the anal opening before the colonoscopy discovered a 6cm rectal tumour.

Mr Peterkin was diagnosed with stage 3B bowel cancer. The cancer was later found to have spread to four lymph nodes and ultimately progressed to incurable stage 4 disease.

By December 2025, Mr Peterkin’s condition had deteriorated dramatically and he was rushed to Campbelltown Hospital with a bowel obstruction.

His friend Kailea Bailey, who launched a GoFundMe for the family, said Mr Peterkin underwent surgery but his family was subsequently told there was nothing more that could be done and to prepare for the end of his life.

However, his wife Kristy-Lee pushed for him to be transferred to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.

‘RPA had said, “Send him straight here, don’t stuff around”,’ Ms Bailey said.

‘They got him into surgery first thing Boxing Day. The surgeons there worked an actual miracle.’

Mr Peterkin has since made gradual improvements but now lives with a permanent stoma, Ms Bailey said.

The court then considered how differently Mr Peterkin’s illness might have unfolded had his cancer been investigated earlier.

Justice Sirtes accepted evidence from Mr Peterkin’s expert radiation oncologist, Associate Professor Susan Pendlebury, that his cancer was already present and invasive at the August 2022 consultation but was not yet locally advanced.

The judge found that had Dr Tadros properly questioned and referred Mr Peterkin, he would probably have been diagnosed by about February 2023.

By then his cancer would still have been stage 3B, but the tumour would have been less bulky and his prognosis substantially better.

Associate Professor Pendlebury estimated that a February 2023 diagnosis would have given Mr Peterkin a 46 per cent chance of 10-year survival and a median survival of about nine years.

The court also examined a perforation during Mr Peterkin’s eventual cancer surgery and accepted evidence that the larger, more advanced tumour increased the risk of the complication and subsequent early recurrence.

‘I am satisfied that the harm would have been less likely to occur had the operation occurred in the first quarter of 2023,’ Justice Sirtes said.

The judge found the precautions Dr Tadros needed to take were ‘slight’, saying he needed only to ask additional questions and, after receiving the answers, write a specialist referral.

But the court also found Mr Peterkin failed to take reasonable care of his own health.

Among the matters weighing against him was the haemorrhoids pamphlet Dr Tadros gave him, which warned that bleeding attributed to haemorrhoids could sometimes come from bowel cancer.

Mr Peterkin admitted he had put that warning out of his mind.

When the case was fast-tracked earlier this year, Innova Legal principal solicitor Fadi Chahine, who was not involved in the proceedings, told Daily Mail Australia that proving a delayed diagnosis alone would not be enough.

‘Showing there was a delay in treatment isn’t enough. He has to prove that if he’d been treated earlier, the outcome probably would have been different,’ he said.

The court has now found that an earlier diagnosis would probably have improved Mr Peterkin’s outcome and extended his life expectancy.

The amount of damages and the proportion to be deducted for Mr Peterkin’s own contributory negligence were not determined in the judgment, with those issues left to be decided separately.

According to Bowel Cancer Australia, the country has the world’s highest rate of early-onset bowel cancer among people under 50.

While overall rates have declined, cases in Australians aged 40 to 49 have surged, with bowel cancer now the deadliest cancer for those aged 25 to 54.