Gertrude Muzulu is preparing to sue the hospital after discovering that the hospital staff had left a pair of surgical scissors in her womb.
The scissors went undetected for seven years until a doctor – acting on a hunch after scans failed to pick up the alien object – operated on her in January this year and pulled it out.
Muzulu blames a foreign doctor and a group of local nurses, then based at the hospital for negligently leaving the scissors in her womb.
For seven years, she suffered excruciating stomach pains which worsened after she gave birth to her third child, Otilia Chimbandi, on January 15 last year.
In an exclusive interview, she told Chronicle: “I constantly got ill, experiencing stomach pains. Sometimes I would pass stool with blood and would frequently get admitted to Gweru Hospital.”
Astonishingly, she said doctors would quickly discharge her after failing to diagnose her condition.
“All the scans they carried out showed nothing,” she said.
On January 16 this year, Muzulu visited a local surgery run by Dr Joshua Tayi.
Doctor Tayi had carried out a scan on her in early January but had failed to see the small surgical scissors whose handles had been buried in her intestines.
“My intestines were rotting,” she says. “Dr Tayi decided to operate on me and that’s when he discovered that there was a surgical scissors in my intestines.”
Muzulu is still trying to recover from her experience and the emotional scars which she says will take long to heal.
She had been helping her husband by augmenting family income with money realised from working in odd jobs in other villagers’ fields in her rural home in Gokwe, but her constant sickness caused her to shift base to Gweru where she could easily access medical attention.
Said Muzulu: “My husband works at Zimglass as a machine operator and I had to help him fend for the family. I could not do that anymore because I was always ill.”
Muzulu is now recovering at her Gweru home, but says she now feels “incomplete”, but is delighted the scissors were found.
“I can never thank the good doctor enough,” she told Chronicle.
Her recovery, though, is a cue for Muzulu and her husband, Chimbandi, to sue the hospital that carried out the botched operation.
Chimbandi is threatening to sue the health institution for “tormenting” his wife and causing him to incur huge medical bills.
He said: “The medical expenses that I incurred were a burden to my family. I’m not a member of any Medical Aid Society and I was forced to do some odd jobs to get money to pay for my wife’s treatment.
“Our seven-year-old son is not attending school as we cannot afford the school fees. Most of our money went towards meeting my wife’s medical expenses.”
Chimbandi said at one point he was forced to turn to inyangas and self-proclaimed prophets.
“I started trying prophets and inyangas in search of a solution to my wife’s health problem. I even went as far as Zambia but we still met with no joy. Her condition did not improve,” he said.
Said Chimbandi: “Zvairwadza nekuti taitsvagiswa hurwere husipo. I’m taking legal action against the hospital. I need to be compensated for what we went through as a family. I will soon file papers at the High Court.”
Gweru Provincial Hospital Superintendent, Dr Fabian Mashingaidze, said: “I am aware of the matter, but I’m not well-versed with the finer details. Let him come to our offices so that we can discuss. We’ll certainly do the necessary investigations once we get the details.”
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