Transcript (en)

Four. I was very outgoing, very confident. For six months, I haven't socialised. The grandmother of seven was supposed to have a small cancerous skin tag removed from her pelvic area. Instead, without her knowledge or consent, they removed a large portion of her external genitalia, leaving her permanently disfigured. She was in so much pain, it wasn't funny. It was the 23rd of January and Deborah's procedure was booked in at the Joan Kerner Women's and Children's Hospital, an extension of Melbourne Sunshine Hospital, operated by Western Health. In what would turn out to be a terrible coincidence, at the same time, another woman, also called Deborah sat in the same pre-op room. They called Deborah and I said did you mean Buchanan and they said oh yes you'll do and the woman next to me said I'm Deborah and they said oh no we've got the right one. Did you think anything of that little interaction in the moment? I did because I been a dental nurse for many years and you never call a person or a patient by their first name Deborah did what millions of patients do every day She put her trust in the hands of medical professionals who swore to care for her. The anaesthetist was getting ready to put me to sleep. I'm thinking, where's the surgeon? Oh, well, they must know what they're doing. And I went with it. Deborah still to this day has never met her surgeon but he met her when she finally woke she realized something was horribly wrong I stood up walked over to the bathroom door and I just got in the bathroom door and I hemorrhaged everywhere so I called the nurse she came in I said can you explain why I'm bleeding so badly. She said, oh that's part of the operation and I said, what operation? I said, I had it on here and as I touched it, it was still there. The doctor who performed the surgery was nowhere to be seen. Instead the hospital sent down a junior surgeon. And when I told her my story, she said, oh no, what we did was a horseshoe shape and we stitched around and I said but why were you in there and she looked at me like I was