A Georgia woman had a full hysterectomy for an aggressive cancer she never had, and she did not find out the biopsy belonged to another patient until seven months after the diagnosis. Cassandra Barksdale has filed a negligence claim against Kaiser Permanente over what her attorneys describe as a mislabeled tissue sample that set off every decision that followed.
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Barksdale went to Kaiser Permanente Southwood Medical Center in Jonesboro in early 2025 for heavy bleeding and fibroids. Fibroids are noncancerous growths that form in and around the uterus, and they are extremely common, particularly among Black women, who develop them earlier and more severely than any other group. Heavy bleeding is one of the main reasons women get sent for a biopsy in the first place. Hers was performed on March 10, 2025.
What came back was a diagnosis of aggressive high-grade endometrial uterine cancer. The endometrium is the lining of the uterus. High grade means the cells looked abnormal enough that the cancer would be expected to spread quickly, which is why the treatment plan moves fast and why patients are steered toward surgery rather than watching and waiting. According to the lawsuit, the tissue sample that produced that result was another patient’s, mistakenly labeled as belonging to Barksdale.
On May 15, 2025, she had a total hysterectomy. Surgeons removed her cervix, uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries and four lymph nodes. She was 43. Afterward she was told she would be receiving instructions about chemotherapy.
The removal of the ovaries is the part that changes a person’s life beyond the surgery itself. Taking them out at 43 triggers immediate surgical menopause, which arrives without the gradual ramp of natural menopause and comes with hot flashes, bone density loss, cardiovascular risk and long-term hormone management. It is a permanent decision made in a matter of weeks, and it is only worth making against something like the cancer she was told she had.
In September, a DNA analysis determined that the sample showing aggressive endometrial cancer belonged to a different patient. Not to her. By then she had lived roughly seven months believing she had a fast-moving cancer, had undergone major surgery to treat it, and had been preparing for chemotherapy.
“She came into Kaiser Permanente looking for answers, and she left with a diagnosis that did not belong to her,” her attorney Shannan Young said. “And every step that was taken after that was based off of misinformation.”
Barksdale is a mother of two. Her legal team says she had her tubes tied but had not decided she was finished having children, and that she wanted to keep in vitro fertilization on the table. A tubal ligation closes off one path to pregnancy while leaving the uterus and ovaries in place, which is exactly what IVF works around. The hysterectomy removed that possibility permanently.
It is not clear how the mix-up happened. The lawsuit does not establish where in the chain the sample was mislabeled, and it asks for unspecified damages. None of the coverage so far includes a public response from Kaiser Permanente, and the organization has not addressed the claim on the record.
Errors like this are hard to measure because there is no national tracking of how often pathology samples get switched or mislabeled. What exists are scattered cases and small studies. An Ohio woman filed a similar suit after a 2019 biopsy error led to a lung cancer misdiagnosis and unnecessary surgery. A 2011 research paper studying prostate cancer found three cases of biopsy sample misidentification over a two-year period. Labs have adopted barcode systems for specimen labeling and point-of-care testing specifically to reduce the risk, which tells you the risk is real enough to build systems around.
The part that lands hardest here is that the cancer in that sample belonged to a real person. Somewhere there was another patient whose tissue was in that pipeline, and the same labeling error that gave Barksdale a diagnosis she did not have raises the question of what it did to the person whose sample it actually was. Nothing in the public filings addresses that.
Barksdale’s claim is at the beginning of its process. There has been no finding of liability and no trial date.
