Cancer survivor 'kicked out' of hospital before potentially fatal condition found
"I grabbed that doctor's hand and begged him not to discharge me. I genuinely thought I was going to die with the pain I was in. You wouldn't treat a dog like that."
A cancer survivor claims she was "kicked out" of a Scottish hospital whilst enduring excruciating agony just hours before doctors discovered she was battling a potentially fatal condition.
Tracy Jardine, from Stonehouse, South Lanarkshire, had only been wed for a few weeks when she was rushed to University Hospital Wishaw suffering unbearable pain. The mother-of-three described how she "felt like she was in labour" and pleaded with a doctor not to send her home before being discharged.
The 52-year-old carer said she returned home "screaming in pain" before medics at another hospital found she had a perforated bowel along with a series of additional health issues which have left her requiring a stoma operation. She said: "I grabbed that doctor's hand and begged him not to discharge me.
"I genuinely thought I was going to die with the pain I was in. No one should ever be made to feel like that. It's medical neglect at it's highest. You wouldn't treat a dog like that."
Tracy, who defeated cancer of the womb in her twenties following a hysterectomy, attended the Wishaw hospital on September 18 with severe pain in her vagina and side. The mum was taken in by the gynaecology team, where she endured a series of examinations and two CT scans over a three-day period as the agony intensified, reports the Daily Record.
But she said the scans failed to identify the cause, only showing a flare-up of a previously-diagnosed bowel condition. She said: "I was given minimal pain relief. I felt like I was a drug addict begging 'please help me, I'm in so much pain'. I've delivered children with no pain relief so I thought I had a good pain threshold, but this was something else."
On the third day, Tracy said she was given antibiotics and moved to a "side room" where she was seen by a doctor. She recalled: "The doctor came around and said 'I think you're ok to go home'. I said 'I'm not'. I told him 'the pain is worse than what you think it is, there's got to be something wrong.
"He said 'I can't find anything wrong with you'. They said it was not a gynaecology issue. But they had a duty of care to me. How can you send me home in the pain I was in? I begged that doctor to send me to the bowel team. He said he'd spoken to them and they thought it was fine for me to go home.
"I had my holdall and had to hobble out of that ward, breaking my heart, to get a taxi to bring me home. I was sent away without so much as an antibiotic. I was crying, screaming in pain all the way home. I hoped the painkillers I had would do until the morning until I could see the doctor, but they didn't. I rolled about my living room floor. In the morning I went straight to the doctor and begged him not to send me back to Wishaw, so he sent me to Hairmyres."
Tracy revealed that she bypassed A&E and was immediately given morphine and taken for a CT scan upon admission. She shared: "I was told I had a perforated bowl and my infection markers were through the roof. Hairmyres made me feel like I was being looked after properly. It was like they finally believed the pain I was in. I cannot fault the doctors and nurses."
As her health deteriorated, Tracy underwent additional scans which she says revealed more complications each time. The mum revealed that doctors discovered a cyst on both ovaries and a collection of pus in her fallopian tube.She also suffered from bleeding, believed to have been caused by a burst abscess.
It emerged that Tracy, who works night shifts at a care home, had been resistant to antibiotics for weeks, resulting in her being administered specialist medication intravenously. She shared: "I was told if I'd been discharged with the wrong antibiotics I could have died."
Further examinations showed Tracy was fighting an E.coli infection before medics found she had a bowel-vaginal fistula, a rare opening that forms between the organs. This is thought to have caused her initial "diverted pain".
After nearly three weeks, Tracy was discharged from Hairmyres last week and is now recovering at home. However, she has been left unable to work and has filed a formal complaint with the health board.
She said: "I have to go back into Hairmyres to get a stoma operation in the coming weeks. I'm so angry and hurt. This can't happen to another person again. I only got married in July. When I look at my wedding photographs and look at me now, I don't even look like the same person after what I've been through."
Stephen Peebles, Deputy Director of Acute Services at NHS Lanarkshire, said: "While we cannot discuss individual patients we would encourage this lady to contact our patient affairs team to discuss her concerns."