A general surgeon called, and asked the urologist (who happened to be my girlfriend) if she could help him with a patient “with complications.”
Only when the patient told her who had operated on her before the “complications” started — the surgeon had been pretty vague on that particular point — she knew that this case was VERY urgent.
This OB/GYN happened to be ill reputed in the hospital, and on many an occasion the urologist had to intervene in cases where the OB/GYN had essentially butchered his patient. He often started surgeries which he technically didn’t master — this was (and still is) an OB/GYN with two twisted left hands — and then somebody else had to bail him out.
The general surgeon was a good friend of the OB/GYN, and he was called first so that the urologist would not know that the OB/GYN messed up once again. But it didn’t work out.
It turned out that during the hysterectomy the OB/GYB initially had performed, he had ruptured the patient’s bladder, and so the urologist needed to reconstruct the bladder. Which she did.
A couple of days later, the patient became very sick again — now actually on the verge of dying from Sepsis. So the urologist opened up the patient once again — after forbidding the OB/GYN to even touch the patient (which he was planning to do) — and in a race against time, she found out that the OB/GYN had cut off one of the patient’s ureters as well.
The patient survived, but only barely.
The bleak thing about such a case (which happens all the time in OB/GYNs), is that a patient rarely knows what really happened during surgery —
And they never learn who saved the day.
SOURCES: medical illustration by Scott Bodell.
