Being the victim of a surgical mixup is the stuff of nightmares for anyone.
To go in to have one’s appendix removed, and to wake up with no arms? It’s the kind of stuff that only happens in cartoons.
Almost.
Four Corners last night aired the story of Gippsland teenager Brittany Thomas, 17, an aspiring cricketer, who went into surgery for a standard operation on her fractured thumb at Latrobe Regional Hospital.
Five days later, experiencing agony in the area where her thumb was, she went to her local GP who, after cutting away the plater, was shocked to find that the tourniquet used to cut off blood supply to her thumb during the surgery had been left on, underneath the plaster.
“If you leave (a tourniquet) on and continue to restrict the blood flow to the thumb, it will die,” said Tom Ballantyne, her lawyer.
After being rushed to emergency, Britany’s thumb was tragically amputated, replaced with her big toe, with a new big toe created with her hip-bone.
Routine surgery had turned into a nightmare.
From fractured thumb to no thumb all
“People ask me, ‘Oh why does your thumb look so weird?'” Britney said.
“And I’m like, ‘Because it’s not my thumb, it’s my toe.”
It’s very devastating … We thought we had robust procedures and policies in place to ensure that we had a very safe environment”, said hospital chief director Peter Craighead.
“We weren’t the victims, but we were part of the problem.”
While the story shows how far human error can go, it also reveals some troubling administrative challenges facing hospitals, especially in regional Australia (but not exclusively).
“We thought we had robust procedures and policies in place to ensure that we had a very safe environment,” said Mr Craighead.
“The best thing we could make sure is that what happened to Britney didn’t happen again.”
