Mr Coyne described how his wife underwent procedures, along with chemotherapy and radiotherapy, and was left with “two small mounds on her chest wall”.
He said: “She had assumed that that was the correct procedure.”
And he said Paterson had a good “bedside manner” and was reassuring to them both.
But he said neither of them realised she had not had a proper mastectomy, and Mrs Coyne went on to develop secondary liver cancer in 2004.
After she died at home in Hampton Coppice, Solihull, the family were doing their best to move forwards when “rumblings” began in the local press in 2010-11.
Reports began questioning whether a so-called cleavage-sparing mastectomy was a correct procedure for patients.
He said: “We were thinking if she’d had the full flat-chested mastectomy would that have meant to say there would not have been a secondary cancer situation?
“Obviously it did raise those thoughts and concerns and it makes you feel, I suppose, angry, that maybe a correct procedure wasn’t carried out.”
