Yellowknife (July 18/03) - Doctors didn't do enough to save Agnes Etsemba, says the woman's sister and close friend.

The 29-year-old woman died on June 23, after a blood clot in her leg travelled to her lungs.

Etsemba was diagnosed with the clot a month before she died, and told the condition was life-threatening if it went to her lungs.

She was being treated with blood thinners.

For the last two weeks of her life, Etsemba had difficulty breathing and went to see a doctor twice, said her sister Suzanne Etsemba-Sangris and friend Theresa Macnab.

She was kept overnight at the hospital in mid-June, told it might be recurring asthma and sent home with ventilin, they said.

Days before she died, she went to a medical clinic in the city.

"They told her it's a common cold and to go take cough syrup", said Macnab.

But Sangris and Macnab didn't find out shortness of breath was a sign something was going wrong until Etsemba was dead and they spoke with NWT Chief Coroner Percy Kinney, they said.

They believe her sister's death could have been prevented, if doctors had recognized the signs.

"It's not as if we are living in the 18th century, when there wasn't the technology," said her sister.

"My mother had this problem before, and she's still here."

"Why would they prescribe her ventilin? That's what I can't understand."

Kinney plans to have an out-of-territory clinician review the case to see if Etsemba was treated appropriately.

"It would seem that treating someone in a case like this with blood thinners would be appropriate," he said.

"You can't predict what's going to happen, so you act accordingly.

"But I'm not a medical person, so I'm going to have a medical person look at it."