For months, Cassandra Barksdale believed she was dying.
She told her sons she had five years to live. She made funeral plans. She sat with the weight of an aggressive, high-grade uterine cancer diagnosis and tried to figure out how to say goodbye. Then, on May 15, 2025, surgeons at Northside Hospital in Atlanta removed her uterus, cervix, fallopian tubes, ovaries and four lymph nodes. She was 43 years old, the mother of two boys, and she went under the knife because the pathology said she had no choice.
Five days later, the surgical pathology came back. No malignant cells. No carcinoma. No malignancy anywhere in the removed tissue.
The cancer had never been hers.
According to a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Clayton County State Court, a lab error at a Kaiser Permanente facility in Jonesboro resulted in another patient’s cancerous biopsy specimen being attributed to Barksdale, setting off a chain of medical decisions that ended with an unnecessary hysterectomy, surgical menopause, permanent infertility, and months of believing she had a terminal illness.
Barksdale, now 43 and a Fulton County resident, is suing Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of Georgia, Inc., Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc., Kaiser Permanente Insurance Company, and Cecelia Prestridge, identified in the complaint as a senior laboratory information analyst for Kaiser, along with five unidentified lab employees. The suit was filed August 4 and announced at a news conference the same morning.
What the Complaint Says Happened
The alleged error traces back to March 10, 2025. Barksdale had been seen at Kaiser Permanente Southwood Comprehensive Medical Center in Jonesboro in January 2025 for abnormal uterine bleeding and fibroids, and was referred for further evaluation. At that March appointment, she underwent an endometrial tissue biopsy.
The complaint alleges Kaiser lab personnel failed to properly identify, label and maintain chain of custody over the specimen before sending it to Quest Diagnostics for analysis. Quest, which is not a defendant and is not accused of wrongdoing, processed what it received. Two days later, on March 12, Quest reported findings of “high-grade endometrial uterine carcinoma with serous features” — an aggressive form of uterine cancer.
On March 17, Barksdale got a phone call telling her she had it.
A CT scan taken in the days that followed showed no evidence of cancer. That finding, which might have prompted a pause or a second biopsy, apparently did not stop the referral process. By May, she was being evaluated by Dr. Adam Pyrzak, a gynecologic oncologist at Northside Hospital, who reviewed the imaging and the pathology results, performed a pelvic exam, and recommended a total hysterectomy. According to the complaint, no additional confirmatory testing was done before the surgery was scheduled.
She had the operation May 15.
When the removed organs came back from pathology on May 20, there was nothing there. No cancer. Not a single malignant cell in the entire endometrial cavity.
On June 1, at a follow-up appointment, Pyrzak reportedly told Barksdale she did have an aggressive cancer — but that it had been “caught early” — and that chemotherapy would follow. In July, staff again told her she had cancer and to await further instructions.
It was not until September 23, 2025, that Kaiser administrators sat down with her and disclosed what DNA testing had confirmed: the cancerous biopsy sample was not hers. It belonged to a different patient entirely.
Quest formally notified her to disregard the original results in December 2025.
The lawsuit was filed eight months later.
“A Bizarre Case”
Roderick Edmond, the managing partner of The Edmond Firm in Atlanta and lead counsel for Barksdale, is himself a physician and attorney who began his legal career at The Cochran Firm. He described the case at Tuesday’s news conference as “a bizarre case,” and questioned how such an error could occur given modern medicine’s reliance on computers, science and artificial intelligence.
The complaint’s theory of liability is specific: fault lies with Kaiser’s lab personnel and their handling of the specimen before it ever reached Quest. The treating physicians, including Pyrzak, are named in the narrative but are not defendants. Edmond’s framing is that every downstream decision — the cancer diagnosis, the oncology referral, the hysterectomy — flowed from a single mistake from Kaiser’s lab.
Kaiser has not yet filed a response to the lawsuit.
The Other Patient
There is a second person at the center of this story whose name will likely never appear in any public record.
The complaint acknowledges that the cancerous biopsy sample belonged to a real patient — someone who actually had high-grade endometrial cancer. Edmond has publicly raised the question of whether that patient’s care was delayed as a result of the mix-up, and whether other patients may have been affected by similar errors at the same facility.
“How long” such mislabeling may have been occurring, Edmond said, is a question that discovery could answer.
Privacy law shields that patient’s identity and outcome. Whether she received timely treatment, whether she was ever told what happened, and whether Kaiser’s internal review turned up additional affected specimens are all open questions — ones the lawsuit may eventually force into the record.
A Known Problem Without a Simple Fix
Specimen labeling errors are not rare enough to be shocking, and not common enough to be accepted. Published error rates range from roughly 0.1% to 5% of specimens, depending on the study and how errors are defined. A College of American Pathologists study of 136 institutions found mislabeling rates of about one per 1,000 cases, with errors occurring at multiple points in the process.
A 2017 article in the Journal of Applied Laboratory Medicine estimated more than 160,000 adverse patient events per year in the United States are tied to specimen and patient identification errors in labs.
The standard safeguards — barcode-based positive patient identification, RFID chips, formal double-check protocols — have been shown to work. One hospital cut labeling errors by about 74% after implementing barcode positive identification in phlebotomy. Whether those safeguards were in place at Kaiser Southwood, and whether they were followed, is central to what the lawsuit will try to establish.
Comparable cases have surfaced before. An Ohio woman sued over a 2019 biopsy error that led to a lung cancer misdiagnosis and unneeded surgery. A 2011 research paper documented three cases of prostate biopsy sample misidentification over two years. The pattern is not new. The consequences, for the people caught inside it, are.
What Barksdale Says She Lost
The complaint frames the harm in terms that go well beyond the physical. Barksdale was forced into surgical menopause at 43. She can no longer have biological children. She has been diagnosed with PTSD, anxiety and depression. She has been in weekly counseling. She described experiencing suicidal thoughts during the months she believed she had terminal cancer.
She told her sons she had five years to live.
When she learned the cancer was never hers, she said she was relieved — and then immediately worried about the patient whose real cancer may have gone unaddressed while her own case consumed the attention of an oncology team.
The suit seeks compensatory damages in excess of $10,000 — standard Georgia pleading language that sets a floor, not a ceiling — along with a jury trial, attorney’s fees and other relief.
B.T. Clark is the Publisher of The Georgia Sun and author of Principles Are Like Pants… You Ought to Have Some. Over two decades in journalism, he has served as Managing Editor of Neighbor Newspapers in metro Atlanta and Digital Director at Times-Journal Inc., earning multiple awards along the way. His work has appeared in newspapers across the state, including The Cherokee Tribune and The Marietta Daily Journal.
- B.T. Clark
- B.T. Clark
- B.T. Clark
- B.T. Clark
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