JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The wife of former Jacksonville University basketball great Rex Morgan, who died Jan. 15 after a lengthy illness, is suing a pathologist who she says missed a cancer diagnosis for her husband in 2011.
Rex Morgan was 67 years old when he died. He left behind his wife, Kathleen Morgan, and two children.
The Charleston, Illinois, native and longtime Arlington Country Day School basketball coach was diagnosed with Stage 3 throat cancer on his right tonsil in 2010. He was treated aggressively and was told he was cancer-free, but a suspicious bump appeared on his tongue in November 2011, according to Kathleen Morgan's attorney, Seth Pajcic.
Rex Morgan's doctors sent a sample of the lump for biopsy, and the pathology report from Quest Diagnostics in Tampa said there was “no malignancy identified" and that the reading was consistent with a fungal infection.
But a biopsy taken from the same spot in January 2014 was diagnosed as invasive carcinoma, said Pajcic, who filed a lawsuit Monday on Kathleen Morgan's behalf against the pathologist and his employer, Quest Diagnostics.
READ: Rex Morgan biopsy reports | Lawsuit filed over Rex Morgan biopsy
“This was a miss by the pathologist in 2011,” Pajcic said. “If the correct reading was done in November 2011, aggressive treatment would have been started at that time. Kathleen's husband would still be here with us. Instead, she's lost her husband and this city and this community has lost a true legend in Rex Morgan.”
Pajcic said independent experts reviewed the slides from the 2011 pathology report and determined that the biopsy should have come back as cancer.
A local pathologist not connected with the case told News4Jax that about 1 percent of biopsies are misdiagnosed and differences opinion do occur.
“Some tissues have features in them that resemble carcinoma, but to other pathologists, they don't look like carcinoma, and you can have a discrepancy there,” Dr. Manuel Menes said.
Menes said that discrepancy could have been the case for Rex Morgan's biopsy. He said doctors could have found the correct reading, depending on what part of the tissue was tested.
“They may send the pathologist a large piece of normal tissue, and you might have changes in the normal tissue, such as ulceration, inflammation, fungus, different things that might mimic an inflammatory process, an infectious process and not the cancer, and the actual cancer was never taken in the biopsy,” Menes said. “We call that sampling error, and it's very common.”
Kathleen Morgan said she was angry and devastated when she learned that her husband did have cancer after the 2011 report said he did not.
“You can't fix it. So much time had passed that there was no way to fix it,” she said. “By missing that, they cost him his life.”
Pajcic said the January 2014 pathology report showed that the tumor was well-differentiated, which means it was slow-growing and would have been responsive to treatment.
Pajcic said by the time they found Morgan's tumor, it was all the way down into the bone of the mouth.
“His physicians that were treating him here, they were just as misled by this false pathology report as Rex,” Pajcic said. “If they had gotten the correct pathology report, they would have treated him. They would have done what they had done the first time around. His physicians here in Jacksonville were just as misled as Rex Morgan.”
Pajcic said Rex Morgan came to his firm, along with Kathleen, after the 2014 cancer diagnosis to set the process in motion for the lawsuit before he died.
“He was very frustrated also and (asked) 'How did this happen? How did a professional make this miss on something so easy?'” Pajcic said.
“We both felt like we didn't want anybody else to go through this,” Kathleen Morgan said. “That's why I'm here. That's why we both came to Seth, to make sure that this misreading of the slides never happens to anybody again.”
News4Jax attempted to reach Quest Diagnostics for comment, but our calls and emails were not returned.