Quebec woman wonders why she’s being asked to pay thousands for cancer medication

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include a statement from the health authority received after the time of publishing.

Forty-two year-old Laval, Que. resident Jessie Putre isn’t shy about showing her mastectomy scar publicly because she says she wants people to see what can happen if they delay getting a mammogram.

“I was actually told, ‘I wouldn’t worry about it, you’re young, you’re healthy,’ ” she says, claiming that’s what her family doctor told her last year when she asked for the exam, given her family’s history.

Then, in the spring of 2024, she found a lump in her right breast. On March 13, she was diagnosed with HER-2 positive, an aggressive and recurring form of cancer. She says her surgeon urged her to get an operation as soon as possible.

“From what they could see in the ultrasound it had started to spread into my lymph nodes,” she told Global News. “I have invasive ductal carcinoma. It had spread like a spider’s web across my breast, nine centimetres horizontally and seven centimetres vertically.”

Given wait times in hospitals, she opted to go to a private clinic and had the mastectomy done within one week.

She went back to the public system to get chemotherapy and radiation in hospital.

Putre says her medical team recommends Perjeta as an antibody treatment.

Perjeta is the brand name for pertuzumab. According to perjeta.com, “Perjeta is given with another targeted treatment called Herceptin. Both treatments are designed to fight cancer cells that have too many HER2 receptors, but in different ways.”

According to Putre, St. Mary’s hospital refused to cover the cost since she had the surgery before taking the treatment. Now, she says she’s expecting to pay $68,000.

Her good friend, Patricia Sasso, told