In a litigation that ran into 14 years, defeating the very concept of ‘speedy justice’, the Thiruvananthapuram District Consumer Disputes Redressal Forum here has awarded ₹10 lakh as compensation to a woman for the medical complications, pain, and hardships that she underwent owing to a foreign body that was left inside her abdomen during a surgery.
The forum has ordered Apollo Hospital Enterprises Ltd., Chennai, and one of its doctors who performed the surgery, to jointly pay the compensation to R. Mini, the complainant.
The incident pertaining to the case occurred in 2003. And though the case was filed in the district forum in the same year, the case never progressed as Apollo Hospitals secured a stay on it from the Madras High Court for eight years. The case again dragged on for years because of the innumerable adjournment motions filed by the opposite party.
S. Reghukumar, a senior counsel who represented the complainant, said this case was one of the longest running litigations in trial stage in the history of the district forum. Most complainants get disheartened and drop their pursuit of justice when cases drag on.
Mini, an IT professional working in Chennai, had undergone a surgery at the Apollo Hospitals following ectopic pregnancy on January 20, 2003.
However, her ordeal was just beginning as the surgical wound remained unhealing, oozing pus, and she was in severe pain even three months after surgery. Meanwhile, because of ill- health, both she and her husband had to resign their well-paying jobs to return to their native place in Thiruvananthapuram.
Fallopian tube damaged
She consulted another doctor here and a CT scan revealed the presence of a foreign body in the abdomen, a swab of 2.5 cm length and 3 mm thickness. She underwent a second surgery to remove the object on June 24. By then, she had suffered severe infection and her remaining fallopian tube had also been damaged, leaving her unable to conceive naturally.
At the court, she pointed out the hardships and agony she had suffered, the loss of employment and career, and the fact that an IVF was the only way for her to have a child.
The opposite parties denied all allegations and claimed that all protocols had been followed and that all sponge and gauze pads used had been counted before and after the surgery.
However, the surgeon at the hospital in Thiruvananthapuram vouched for the fact that it was indeed a foreign body that he had removed from the woman’s abdomen through a surgery.
