Tyanne said she was told she would need urgent surgery to determine its cause and to rule out the likes of cancer – then nothing happened at all
Tyanne said she still had not been told what caused her to become seriously ill(Image: Tyanne Goodman)
A young woman claims she has been failed by medics who found a large “suspicious” mass inside her, and then left her with no answers for more than a year.
Tyanne Goodman said she has never been told what the growth was, and that she even had to beg doctors for a scan in the first place after weeks of excruciating pain.
But before the results came through the 30-year-old from Crumlin said she found herself fighting for her life in hospital with sepsis, when she was first informed of the mass.
Tyanne said she was told that she would need urgent surgery to determine its cause and to rule out the likes of cancer. However, that was more than a year ago. Stay informed on the latest health news by signing up to our newsletter here
After obtaining her medical notes Tyanne believes she likely suffered an undiagnosed cyst which burst and led to sepsis. However, nobody has confirmed it either way and she continues to live in fear of what could be going on inside her own body.
Tyanne wants to raise awareness of what happened to her to help others(Image: Tyanne Goodman)
The notes, seen by WalesOnline, also reveal that a doctor refused to help Tyanne while she was seriously unwell. Tyanne described her care as “barbaric”, while the health board has apologised for the impact of her experience.
Tyanne said her experience of feeling dismissed by medics had left her in such a dark place mentally that she had been suicidal, with her family having to watch over her.
She hopes sharing her story will highlight the importance of taking women’s health seriously, and will encourage others to advocate for themselves.
“It has destroyed me as a person. I’m not the same person I was before,” she said. “I just want young women to know that they have a voice and that they should use it, because these people who are supposed to be keeping us safe aren’t doing it,” she claimed.
Years of pain and miscarriages
Although this ordeal sounds traumatic enough for one person to go through, Tyanne said this wasn’t even the beginning of her medical nightmare.
She explained how she had lived with painful and irregular periods ever since her teenage years, and was told it “looked like” polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).
This continued into her adult years and, heartbreakingly, led to her suffering four miscarriages as well as having difficulties conceiving, for which she said she received limited fertility support.
Tyanne with her husband, Sam(Image: Tyanne Goodman)
Tyanne pregnant shortly before the couple sadly suffered a miscarriage(Image: Tyanne Goodman)
She explained: “Ever since I was around 14 or 15 I had really bad bleeding and pain around the time of my period. PCOS ran in my mum’s side of the family and so my mum was very on top of knowing the symptoms.
“I would then go six or seven months without a period. My mum was my biggest voice and advocate because I was constantly told either to be put on the pill or wait until I want children and then come back.
“My GP would say they think it could be endometriosis, and then would refer me to gynaecology. They would tell me to go away and lose weight.
“It’s been like that since I was 15 – up until 2020 when things started getting really bad in terms of trying for a baby. I suffered multiple miscarriages and was constantly being told to lose weight and come back.” She added that losing weight was notoriously challenging for women with PCOS.
Physically, Tyanne said her pain level around this time could reach a 10 out of 10. It saw her having to leave her career as a solicitor while her family and husband cared for her
Medic says having a baby is the ‘solution’, before scan flags mass
In November, 2023, Tyanne said her GP urgently referred her back to the gynaecology department at the Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport. Shockingly, she said that during the appointment she was advised that the best way to relieve her symptoms of PCOS and endometriosis was to have a baby.
She said: “I just thought: ‘hang on a minute. I’ve spent the best part of 10 years trying to become a mum. It’s not that simple. If they just read my history they’d see how difficult that is for [me and my husband]’.
“He told me to go away and lose weight and then they could try looking into helping me have a baby. I had been on the weight management waiting list for two years by that point.
“When I asked him how much longer it would be, he said around four more years – and by then you would be classed as a geriatric mother and the NHS won’t help you.
“He then sent me for a scan, which I had to beg for because I knew something was seriously wrong due to the pain. This was my first scan in seven years.”
Tyanne said the mass was clear for everyone to see(Image: Tyanne Goodman)
Tyanne said she had her scan in early 2024, which flagged up some sort of growth on her ovary. But before the formal results of the scan came through, Tyanne was rushed into hospital on March 14, 2024, after experiencing pain so intense that she fell unconscious.
“By the time they got back to me with the results of my scan I was at the Grange Hospital with sepsis dying,” she said.
“It was like somebody was ripping my insides out. I couldn’t stand up straight, I couldn’t walk. I was throwing up what looked like black tar. I knew it was bad but at the time I wanted to stay at home and die because I didn’t trust them. I had lost so much faith in the system.
“Then I fell unconscious and my husband rushed me up to the Grange where they left me in the A&E waiting room for 12 hours.”
Sepsis and an urgent operation needed to rule out cancer – which ‘does not happen’
Tyanne said she was prescribed strong painkillers and fell unconscious again while she was waiting, but that she didn’t feel that medics were taking her seriously – until they sent her for a scan.
“[The results] came back and the nurse said it looked like I had a 12cm cyst on my ovary and it was wrapped around my ovary and fallopian tubes. He said it is going to have to be taken out.
“It looked like the ovary had basically died so he said I might have to have my ovary taken away and anything else that is damaged. They said they won’t know the extent of that until they look inside.”
Tyanne said that medics seemed so concerned about her at this point that a full hysterectomy was even being considered. She said one doctor even told her that they were trying to rule out cancer.
Bruises on Tyanne’s arm due to difficulties cannulating her(Image: Tyanne Goodman)
Medics said it was too risky for her to have surgery, Tyanne said(Image: Tyanne Goodman)
Meanwhile, Tyanne said she continued to feel extremely unwell, and that medics were trying to treat her for an infection. It wasn’t until several days into her eight-day stay that she discovered she was being treated for sepsis, she said.
She said that with this added complication – and a lack of specialist surgeons willing to carry the surgery out – her urgent surgery to remove the mass did not happen.
“At one point I was put in scrubs, ready to be wheeled down but then a gynaecologist told me they were worried I wouldn’t make it out alive, so I didn’t have the operation,” she said.
After eight days at the Grange, Tyanne was told that her infection markers had reduced and she was sent home with oral antibiotics. She was promised that her urgent operation would take place within six weeks.
However, Tyanne said this was never followed up. She said she did not hear anything else about her operation until March, 2025 – and that only came after she chased it up herself.
‘I went a whole year thinking I was dying’
“I went an entire year thinking I was dying,” she said. During that time whenever I saw my mum or my husband or my family or friends I would cry because in the back of my head I thought: ‘This is going to be the last time I see you because I’m going to die’.
“I went back and forth to my GP to see what was going on, to see if I was still on a waiting list for surgery or to be rescanned. I thought I had absolutely been forgotten about”
“He then got in touch with my gynaecologist to say I had been left for more than a year with a suspicious growth on my ovary with no scans. Then I got a letter to say I would have surgery on May 31.”
However, having been without a scan for more than a year, Tyanne questioned how this could go ahead without further investigation. “My query was how are they going to perform a surgery on something they haven’t scanned in more than a year? They could open me up and it could be 10 times worse, or not there at all.
“I had that scan and we could still see what looked like the growth on my ovary, but now they are trying to say that it isn’t there, that it is just fluid and bulky tissue left over.
“I had an appointment in June, 2025, and I asked what is going to happen with what is left over, and they just wanted to discharge me without checking it.”
She said she was told they were confident whatever it was had burst, and that she did not need any surgery. “For them to have never confirmed it had burst until then is terrible.”
Medical notes reveal doctor didn’t help
Following her experience Tyanne said she had spent the last year trying to access her medical notes.
She said they finally came through recently and their contents had left her further appalled.
The notes, seen by WalesOnline with Tyanne’s permission, reveal that while Tyanne was seriously unwell with sepsis a nurse asked a doctor for help, because Tyanne was “hard to cannulate” – something that can happen to sepsis patients because the circulatory system is affected.
However, in response the notes state: “Doctor stated [they] didn’t have time to cannulate and [that they] will pretend I didn’t tell [them] as [they haven’t] got time to contact anaesthetist.”
The notes reveal that around this time – according to Tyanne’s most recent blood test taken some hours earlier – that her C-reactive protein (CRP) levels were above 230 mg/L.
Any level below 10 mg/L is considered normal and results of 200 mg/L and higher can be associated with sepsis. Tyanne’s later rose to around 400 mg/L.
Tyanne said: “When I read in my notes that a doctor had said: ‘I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,’ I was so scared and upset, but I thought: ‘Finally, I have something that proves what I experienced happened, and that it was so wrong.’
“Just seeing how many times they tried to fit my cannulas, and how many times they couldn’t do it, and how many times they were calling for help and nobody was coming… It was almost barbaric. That’s my life and it felt like they just didn’t care.”
Hopes of becoming a mum
Tyanne feels that she has now met a dead end with her care on the NHS, and that her “trust, faith and confidence in the NHS has been completely obliterated”.
She said she had been left feeling as though her only option was to seek private treatment and surgery.
However, she has received a quote of £8,500 for the surgery and said it was something “impossible” to achieve with only one source of full-time income.
It is also important to Tyanne that she is treated as soon as possible so she can improve her quality of life and fulfil her lifelong dream of becoming a mum. She is currently raising funds as a last resort of achieving this. You can support Tyanne’s GoFundMe here.
She explained: I am raising money to go private to get more answers; to see if what I’ve been told is true or not. I can’t take their word that [the mass] has all gone because I could see it on the screen in the last scan.
“We are looking into an investigative laparoscopy, where they have a look around to see what’s going on. If I need something removed, that’s how they determine it.
“Once we sort that out, the attitude of the private consultant was that we have 15 years max to try and have a child, whereas the NHS said it’s basically too late.”
Tyanne still hopes to be a mum one day, and is trying her best to hold on to that hope(Image: Tyanne Goodman)
Describing how much it would mean to her to become a mum, Tyanne said: “I always changed my mind about what I wanted to do when I grew up, but one thing I always knew was that I wanted to be a mum.
“We have been married nearly 10 years and we have been trying to become parents ever since we got together. We’ve always wanted a shot at being parents.
“The cause of my infertility has never been confirmed because doctors previously wouldn’t refer me or help me because of my weight, even though PCOS is notorious for weight gain and difficulty losing weight.
“I would be eating healthily and going to the gym, exercising so hard. I would lose some weight and it would just stop.”
She said the private consultant confirmed that she would likely not be able to lose the weight alone due to her health issues, and prescribed her PCOS treatment metformin which can also assist with weight loss. “Why has that been so difficult over all these years?,” she said.
Tyanne said she did now feel a glimmer of hope, but said it was hard for her to think positively after everything she had been through.
She said: “I do want that hope, but I feel like I can’t relax too much because I’ve been let down so many times. I’m always waiting for the next bad thing to happen.”
Tyanne has submitted a formal complaint via the health board as part of NHS Wales’ Putting Things Right complaints process.
Health board response
In response to WalesOnline, a health board spokesman apologised for how her experience had impacted her life.
He said: “We are very sorry to hear about the experience that Tyanne has had while under our care. We understand how distressing and disruptive this has been for her, and we sincerely apologise for the impact it has had on her life.
“Tyanne’s concerns are currently being investigated by our Putting Things Right team, and it would be inappropriate to comment further while this process is ongoing.
“Our gynaecology team has been in direct contact with Tyanne to discuss her concerns, and we are committed to providing her with a full response as soon as the investigation is complete.”