By PAUL YANDALL
A woman says she was kept waiting three days in hospital to have a small splinter removed from her thumb. She eventually grew so tired of waiting that she squeezed it out herself.
Julie Nicholson, a part-time librarian, was admitted with an infected thumb after a splinter lodged itself in it while she was gardening.
After waiting for a surgeon to remove it, Mrs Nicholson removed the splinter herself. While she waited she was rarely allowed to eat or drink in case she was taken for surgery.
"It was bizarre. There I was waiting in the plastic surgery ward, surrounded by people who were in desperate need, and I manage to get the thing out all by myself," she said.
She had a 15-minute operation last Thursday during which a surgeon cleaned and bandaged her thumb. She was discharged the next morning after laying a complaint with the hospital over the length of time she had waited.
But Waikato Hospital says the Hamilton woman needed a three-day course of intravenously administered antibiotics to clean the infection.
Spokeswoman Karen Bennett said: "When we are dealing with a serious infection we can't afford to take risks ... I'd rather she was upset about the wait than if something terrible had happened [to her thumb]."
Ms Bennett said the reason Mrs Nicholson's thumb needed only to be cleaned by the surgeon was that she had had the antibiotic treatment.
But Mrs Nicholson said she could not believe that the hospital had let her take up a bed for a sore thumb. "They're sending people with cancer to Australia and yet they give me a bed for three days. You have to wonder about their priorities."
She was told by two general practitioners to see a surgeon at the hospital and was admitted after a nurse at the accident and emergency unit said her thumb needed to be seen in a sterile operating theatre.
"It was all purple and pus was coming out, but she didn't tell me I was going to take up a bed for three nights. The shame is that it should have gone to someone a little more needy."
She could not understand why the hospital did not give her antibiotics to take away if it was known that she would not be seen for three days. Her family had also lost money because her husband, Michael Nicholson, was forced to take time off his teaching job to care for their three-year-old twin sons, Kieran and James.
Ms Bennett said the case was not a high priority for the hospital and it would not have been wise for a surgeon to have operated on the thumb before the antibiotics course was complete.
Patient sore about thumb
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