This is a story that touches the heart. It is about medical negligence that has put the life of an otherwise healthy woman in the balance. She is in coma even as her distraught daughter, Mrs Damilola Awosedo pens her pains and calls on the Lagos State Government and the public to come to the aid of the family to get the management of Lagos State University Teaching Hospital [LASUTH] to take responsibility instead of playing the Ostrich by keeping mum and carrying on as if nothing has happened.
Read the story as told by Mrs Awosedo:
“My mum was scheduled for an adrenal mass surgery in October 2023 at LASUTH. This is someone that wasn’t having any symptoms and only discovered this tumor because she did a general check up.
On the day of the surgery (12 Oct 2023), it was rescheduled but they didn’t give a date.
On January 1, 2024, the Urology Department of LASUTH called my mum to come in for her surgery on the 2nd which was on a Tuesday. My mum and I went there on the 2nd and they scheduled the surgery for 4th as she had to be admitted few days before the surgery.
On the 4th of January, the surgery was cancelled again as the first patient’s surgery ended late and they only do surgeries on Thursdays (as they said); so we went back home again. She wasn’t really bothered because she was very healthy and wasn’t feeling any type of way except for the fact that she knew that she had Adrenal mass.
On the 9th of January, they called her again and asked her to come in immediately. She told them it was too sudden and she’d come in the next day, which was Wednesday, 10th of January. The next day, she went to the hospital as planned.
On the January 11, they took her to the theatre and commenced the surgery around 2:45pm. At around 5pm, a doctor came out and told me to start looking for blood. I got the blood and by 9pm, they finished the surgery and told us to go and pay for ICU without any explanation. The initial plan was for her to return to the surgical ward.
Later that night, a doctor explained that they mistakenly punctured a blood vessel during the surgery and she lost 4 litres of blood; her heart stopped and they had to do CPR for about 3 minutes before she came back, which resulted in the emergency. This aside, we all know that bleeding might occur during surgery but the patient management fundamentally failed us as they had no preparation for that.
After 3 days in the ICU, which was Sunday, 14th of January, they discharged her to the female surgical ward as she had recovered quickly.
At the female surgical ward she could now walk, talk, and play. The doctors concluded that she was fit to go home on Wednesday, 17th January.
Tuesday night, a nurse came to give my mum her medications. She was injecting her a particular IV when my mum said her eyes were closing. I asked the nurse what she was giving her and she replied that it was antibiotics and told my mum to lie down that maybe she was feeling sleepy before. Then, she proceeded to push in the rest…immediately, my mum said “I can’t breathe anymore and started seizing. I ran to ask for help and some people came in to attend to her.
They sent me out of the room and I tried peeping and saw them snapping the drug so I entered and checked the name…I realized the nurse gave my mum VECURONIUM (NEOVEC), an anaesthesia used in the theatre to paralyse patients before surgical procedures. Even in the theatre they only inject 5mg and this nurse gave my mum 10mg..which means, she gave her the wrong injection, and still gave her overdose.
My mum was rushed to the ICU again fighting in between life and death. This is a patient that walked into this hospital healthy.
According to the doctors, after administering the injection, it immediately stops air passage and the patient is supposed to be put on ventilator immediately. failure to do so, it can affect any of the vital organs in the body.
In my mum’s case, it affected her brain and she hasn’t come around since January 16 that she had been taken to the ICU and is having continuous seizures. The doctors are telling us that the chances of her coming around is 50/50 and we should keep praying.
Now, this injection is not part of the prescriptions since she has been in the hospital. The doctors made it clear that we can’t have access to it and it is only sold in pharmacies close to the operation theatre.
How the injection got to the normal ward, they refused to explain. The nurse that made this grave mistake, they refused to provide her. They are refusing to take any responsibility whatsoever and we sense that they are trying to cover it up.
We have been paying this additional bill and have spent over 400k in 48 hours, excluding the millions we spent before and after her surgery.
I still can’t fathom how a medical nurse will still not know the difference between an anaesthesia and antibiotics. This is the height of incompetence and how the injection got into the ward is still a mystery.
But LASUTH is saying absolutely nothing about it.
PLEASE COME TO OUR AID
Also, according to the doctors, she could have lived with this tumor, but they created fear in us and operated on her only out of their curiosity as this was their first case of Adrenal Mass.
