BOTCHED DIAGNOSTIC TEST LEADS TO LEG AMPUTATION

"The blue-grey colour on Lynette Jeffrey's foot grew "like a wave on the beach", intermittently receding, only to creep higher up her ankle each time. The 50-year-old sat up in a Liverpool Hospital bed and watched in horror as gangrene enveloped her left leg. A doctor told her that she would die within 24 hours if it was not amputated.

Mrs Jeffrey is suing the South West Sydney Area Health Service, and three doctors, for more than $750,000 in the NSW Supreme Court, claiming they failed to warn her of risks from an angiogram she had in August 1997.

"They pushed me up from the bed and my foot was blue, bluey grey ... and then it was a lighter grey," Mrs Jeffrey told the court yesterday. The tragic irony was that Mrs Jeffrey, a diabetic, woke up hours later without her left leg in the same amputee ward where only three months earlier she was told that she would lose her right leg because of circulatory problems and the presence of gangrene on her right foot.

Mrs Jeffrey, who has since moved from Bossley Park in Sydney to her hometown of Ulverstone in northern Tasmania, refused the amputation, and still has her right leg. "I told him [the doctor] straight away that that was not going to happen to me," she said.

However, the diagnostic test she underwent then - an angiogram - had resulted in severe blood clotting in her left leg, after an artery wall in her groin was ruptured with a catheter. The hospital did not deny this happened, but claimed it warned Mrs Jeffrey it was a common complication, the court heard".

["a common complication" !!!!!]

More here.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL hospitals and health insurance schemes should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the very poor and minimal regulation.

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