This is a tragic story of a man whose wife died due to a botched surgery carried out by a student doctor in a hospital in Edo state, Nigeria. The man had registered his pregnant wife for antenatal care at the Edo Specialist Hospital with the sum of #70,000.
On the 27th day of March 2023, he took his wife to the hospital, and after meeting the doctor, she was checked and induced, and they were told to come back in the evening that same day. From there, his wife was ushered into the labour ward where she laboured from that Monday evening till 11 am Wednesday morning before she finally gave birth to a baby boy without any operation conducted on her.
Immediately after delivery, she started bleeding, and the doctor suggested that the only way to stop the bleeding was to remove her womb. In the process of removing her womb, her kidney was affected, which aggravated the whole thing. She kept bleeding, and the doctor instructed the man to buy blood, but all to no avail. The doctor then instructed him to do dialysis, which he did for three days at the cost of #80,000. After which, Doctor Osahon placed his wife on intensive care since her kidney had already been tampered with. A day before she died, he was told to discharge the newborn baby so as to minimize the hospital bills, which his wife consented to. The following day after discharging the baby, at 6 am in the morning, he received a phone call from the hospital that his wife was dead, that he should hurry up to come and remove her dead body as they don’t have a mortuary in the hospital. He was made to pay #600,000 as balance payment before allowing him to carry his deceased wife to a morgue elsewhere. On the 18th day of April after her death, he received a phone call from the Chief Medical Director (CMD) of the hospital, Professor Sunday Adeoye, that his attention was needed at the hospital in respect to his wife’s death. Getting there with some of his family members, they met the CMD and one Doctor Oriakhi, amongst seven other doctors of the hospital who condole and apologize to them that they have discovered that it was a student doctor that operated on his wife. The CMD further said that even if they go to court, it will never be for their favour since the government is involved. The man is calling on the government and all and sundry, especially all relevant agencies saddled with such responsibility with such cases as his, to please help investigate and the needful be done.
