Beauty queen in coma after cosmetic surgery operation

1.00pm - By ANDREW OSBORN in Moscow

Fourteen months after what was supposed to be a minor cosmetic surgery operation, a Russian court has found two doctors guilty of turning one of the country's most promising beauty queens into a comatose vegetable.

The court ruled that plastic surgeon Igor Vorobiev and anaesthetist Yuri Sviridenko were directly responsible for the appalling chain of events which brutally curtailed Ekaterina Sumina's modelling career and normal life.

Both men were given six-month suspended sentences and banned from practising for a period of one and a half and two years respectively. Mrs Sumina's relatives said the punishment was far too lenient and vowed to appeal. They had wanted damages to the tune of some 60,000 pounds but were awarded nothing.

Mrs Sumina, who was twice crowned runner-up in the country's Miss Russia beauty pageant and had a clutch of offers to tread the catwalks in New York, Paris and Milan, decided to go under the knife -- not for the first time -- in July of last year. She was 23 at the time.

Determined to shed what she claimed was excess weight from her slender waist, she signed up for a liposuction operation at the Laser Centre, a cosmetic surgery clinic in her native Samara.

The procedure was supposed to take 40 minutes and she told her husband Sergey that she would be out within three hours and home that night for dinner. She ignored his pleas to forego the operation insisting it was no big deal and lied that her parents (who knew nothing about it) had agreed.

The operation went badly wrong, though, and her heart stopped beating on the operating table after she was given a powerful cocktail of anaesthetics, including Novocaine. The clinic had failed to test her tolerance for the drug that dramatically increased the strength of other substances with which she was administered.

After a panicked interlude of least five minutes during which Mrs Sumina was clinically dead the frightened medics hooked her up to a respiratory ventilator. According to experts they unplugged her --prematurely -- some 15 minutes later.

Despite the fact that her condition was still serious in the extreme they then went ahead and performed the liposuction procedure though they would later claim they had done no such thing.

Some 12 hours later her unmoving body was transferred to a local hospital; she was comatose.

The plastic surgeons were quick to tell her husband and parents that there was nothing to worry about. There might, they admitted, be short-term memory loss but she would soon regain consciousness. But the hospital staff told a very different story.

It wasn't so much a question of when she would wake up but whether she would live at all. Mrs Sumina suffered irreversible and massive brain damage and has been in a coma ever since.

Dubbed 'Sleeping Beauty' by the Russian press, she is cared for in her Moscow flat by a team of medics. Her eyes wide open yet lifeless according to her husband, she is given a little orange juice each day but little else.

Experts says she is unlikely to ever wake up. Incongruously her 'vital statistics' and photographic portfolio were still posted on the internet yesterday.

The plastic surgeons who carried out the operation deny all responsibility and say they too will appeal the ruling.

"It was just an unfortunate incident and Sumina had undergone several operations at our clinic beforehand when everything had been okay," Nikolai Lysov, the clinic's director, told daily Kommersant.

"I would argue that if the patient had died there wouldn't be such a scandal. In other clinics the same thing happens (people dying after cosmetic procedures) all the time."

- INDEPENDENT