By PAULA OLIVER
A woman who went to hospital for a throat operation requiring an overnight stay awoke two days later to find she had been set alight during surgery and suffered horrific burns.
Donna Weir says she remembers being wheeled in for her operation.
Her next memory is of struggling to
breathe when she woke up.
"The first breath I took when I woke up was when I felt the tracheotomy. I knew something must have gone wrong."
The Invercargill woman and her family now face financial hardship as her husband has had to stop work to care for their children.
ACC is investigating and may eventually give Mrs Weir compensation, but the inquiry will take months to complete.
Mrs Weir, aged 34, returned to her Invercargill home on Thursday, four weeks after going into Dunedin Hospital for laser surgery on her throat to clear a build-up of scar tissue from earlier operations.
She told the Herald the incident had stripped her of her dignity.
She spent a "horror week" in intensive care and two weeks in a recovery ward with a breathing tube poking through a hole in her throat.
The tube was inserted in a process known as a tracheotomy.
The Otago District Health Board yesterday conceded that the surgery "probably" should have been done differently.
Surgeons used a plastic oxygen tube during Mrs Weir's operation instead of a metal one.
The intense heat of the laser next to the plastic tube ignited the tube inside her throat, and the oxygen fuelled the fire.
In August, a woman was set alight during a caesarean operation at Waitakere Hospital, and a month before that a man was burned during an appendix operation at Middlemore Hospital.
Mrs Weir learned that her larynx, windpipe and vocal cords were burned and blistered and a lump of molten plastic discovered near her lung was removed.
"I had been told what happened, but it took a few days to sink in. I was in real pain."
Mrs Weir's voice is now husky and weak, and she struggles to maintain speech for any length of time.
"I'm really having to take one day at a time. I'm living on painkillers one day to the next, trying to figure out how to get through the day."
Medical experts say the risk of fire with lasers is well known.
One said incidents were rare, but precautions were always taken.
Otago District Health Board chief executive Dr Bill Adam said yesterday that the operation probably should have been done differently.
"We probably should have waited for a metal tube to be made."
He said surgeons had intended to do the operation with a small metal pipe, but it was too big for the unusually narrow airway.
They then had to decide whether to use a plastic tube or not do the operation.
Mrs Weir, who had a long history of throat problems, had asked that surgeons not make a tracheotomy hole in her neck to enter her windpipe.
Dr Adam said the surgeons would have preferred to do the operation that way, but they were trying to meet her requirements.
"We regret what happened to the patient but we are confident that our people acted honourably and with all the skill necessary. It was an unfortunate complication," he said.
"It's what we would call a medical mishap. It's not misadventure."
Mrs Weir was born with a tumour on her windpipe. For the first 20 years of her life she breathed through an opening in her throat.
After years of operations and attempts to fix her condition, the hole was closed just before she turned 21.
This year, she felt scar tissue growing back and went to Dunedin to have it removed.
Now she is upset that she has been left with a tracheotomy again. It is not permanent but Mrs Weir does not know when it will be removed.
Mrs Weir says her family are struggling financially because of the incident, and she wants ACC to move swiftly to help her.
The corporation is investigating to establish if hers is a case of medical misadventure, but that could take up to nine months.
Until the inquiry is complete, ACC cannot pay her anything.
Mrs Weir says that because she has been in hospital, her husband, Riki, has turned down work as a relief milker to look after their children, aged 12 and 2.
In 10 days she will go for follow-up surgery, with the same surgeon who did her original operation.
"I figure that if it was his mistake, then he can fix it."
By PAULA OLIVER
A woman who went to hospital for a throat operation requiring an overnight stay awoke two days later to find she had been set alight during surgery and suffered horrific burns.
Donna Weir says she remembers being wheeled in for her operation.
Her next memory is of struggling to
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