“I’m staring out to the sea, listening to the waves crashing,” says Deborah Douglas, aka the ‘Erin Brockovich of Birmingham’. The 67-year-old is on holiday in Barbados and, after all she’s been through, you wouldn’t blame her for relaxing by the pool with her husband, permanently. Instead, she’s chatting to a journalist, determined to make as many people as possible aware of what butcher surgeon Ian Paterson did to his patients – including her.
Diagnosed with breast cancer in 2003, Douglas was subjected to seven months of chemotherapy, a mastectomy and reconstructive surgery, when in fact, an independent report found, “I just needed a small lumpectomy, 2cm long, and I’d have been back at work.”
In one of the worst scandals in British medical history, Midlands surgeon Paterson performed numerous…