Just the other weeks — literally less than seven days ago — it happened again. My girlfriend (who is a urologist) was called in because something wasn’t right.
A female patient was feeling really unwell, and stool was leaking out of her vagina. The urologist checked out the patient’s OB/GYN (because that’s where she was coming from), and the urologist knew almost instantly what had happened. Yet again.
After opening the patient, it turned out that she had a rectovaginal fistula — an actual hole between her vagina and her rectum, which enabled the poop to enter her vagina (you get the picture) and leave her body from the wrong side.
And it was the OB/GYN himself who had made the hole through his infamous surgical incompetence which has almost cost the lives of some of his patients.
This is a man who time and again starts surgical procedures that are way above his head, and on many an occasion a urologist or general surgeon has to be called to save the patient. Sometimes during the procedure, sometimes one or two days later.
And yet he never stops. He never doubts his own surgical competence, and never even hesitates to start operating on a patient in procedures that he has messed up more than a dozen times.
And he is not alone, by the way.
Many OB/GYNs (but not all) have this very reputation, and many OB/GYNs have an underwhelming geometrical-anatomical knowledge, and are in general extremely unexperienced when it comes to the less-trivial surgeries. (The famous Hospital Hush Hush Secret.)
And my girlfriend’s colleague is even worse.
But despite all these mistakes, despite the patients he almost lost and the medical problems he caused which needed emergency help by other surgeons, he goes on, and on, and on —
There’s always the next patient, you know.
SOURCES: “Treatise on gynæcology: medical and surgical" (1891), S. J. Pozzi and B. H. Wells, New York: W. Wood. Wellcome Library. (© Public domain)
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