A 17-year-old girl was left with her toe stitched onto her hand after her thumb was amputated because of a huge hospital blunder.
Britney Thomas was on the way to her dream job as a professional cricket player when a simple trip to a hospital turned into a nightmare.
The teen had injured her thumb while playing cricket in Hong Kong. When she got home, a doctor said she had fractured it and she was sent to Latrobe Regional Hospital for a surgery to fix it by a surgeon.
A tourniquet device was applied to her to restrict the blood flow during surgery. The teen was told it would be taken off when the process was done.
The area was sent in plaster and she was sent home. But after five days, she realized something was not right.
Britney told news.com.au that when doctors took off the cast to check, the tourniquet had not been removed after the surgery. Someone had incorrectly written down at it was already taken off but it was still her.
Her mother, Leanne Keating, said: “They pulled the plaster off and it was very dark and looked dead. The skin was all yucky. I was mortified, it was horrible.”
Unfortunately, her thumb could no longer be saved as the blood had been restricted for many days.
“They took me into the emergency and they were like, ‘You’re probably going to lose your thumb,’” Brittany said.
“I was in so much disbelief and I was like, ‘What’s going to happen to me? What’s going to happen to my cricket?’”
She had most of her thumb amputated and her big toe was removed and stitched onto her hand as a replacement.
Tom Ballantyne, her lawyer, said the error is ‘unacceptable’ and “it is medicine 101.”
Peter Craighead, the CEO at Latrobe Regional Hospital, also said: “I felt sick in my stomach. We thought we had robust procedures and policies in place to ensure we had a very safe environment.”
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