Medical error ‘robbed me of a year of my life’

For 18 days, the burning, oozing wound on Lynn Burkitt’s chest grew larger and more painful.

The Medicine Hat woman, who’d recently undergone a double mastectomy, made multiple trips to the emergency room to try to figure out what was wrong.

“It was extreme pain. The smell was gross, the discharge was gross,” she said.

It wasn’t until she’d undergone another surgery that she found out what happened: the doctor who’d performed her mastectomy left two rolls of sterile gauze inside and, with no one taking proper care of the wound, the material was now festering inside her chest.

Burkitt, 52, said she’s since learned that a series of mishap and miscommunications meant that no one — including the homecare nurses taking care of her, the ER doctors or any member of her care team — realized the surgeon had left the gauze inside her wound.

She said she is still recovering from the June 2012 experience and wants to see Alberta Health Services put new safeguards in place so others don’t have to endure the same pain.

“I want answers on what changes they’re going to do, because they said ‘We’re going to come up with new processes.’ ”

In a statement, AHS said a patient safety review at the Medicine Hat hospital “focused on continuity of care, communication between and among caregivers, and smoother transfer of patient care between programs (and) departments.”

Changes have since been made, including a new “visual alert” on a patient chart for unusual or special-care needs, and ongoing efforts to improve communication between caregivers and different departments.

“We have apologized to Ms. Burkitt personally and in writing and we continue to wish her the best in her recovery,” according to the AHS statement.

Burkitt said she chose to undergo a double mastectomy in June 2012 after she was diagnosed with an early stage breast cancer, then soon had another surgery to deal with infection.

She said the homecare nurses who took care of her after the second procedure did the best they could when her wound flared up, but simply didn’t know about the gauze.

According to Burkitt, she was eventually prescribed antibiotics after making multiple trips to the emergency ward.

She said it shouldn’t have taken a surgery for medical staff to read the mastectomy surgeon’s operative report that said the gauze was used on her wound.

The Medicine Hat woman said she’s been trying to get answers from AHS for months on what happened. While representatives assigned to her case told her last fall they’d do a full investigation, she didn’t hear back. It was only after Burkitt took her story public that she said she heard the results of the probe.

“I don’t want anybody else to go through this,” said Burkitt.

“There has to be a policy in place when somebody has packing put inside of them that it is marked on the chart, or people read the chart. There’s no communication that goes on between the different departments.”

“They robbed me of over a year of my life.”

This article is courtesy of the Calgary Herald.