A woman who had three limbs and a hand amputated due to complications from an abortion has issued a warning: “Medical errors like this must not happen again.”
Priscilla Dray, a mother of three, went to the Pellegrin University Hospital in Bordeaux for an abortion on July 22, 2011. She developed a serious infection within two days, claiming that doctors refused to give her antibiotics.
A month after her initial hospital visit, the 35-year-old French woman developed necrosis and had both of her legs, right forearm, and left hand amputated.
On Tuesday, two doctors appeared in Bordeaux Criminal Court on charges of causing involuntary injuries “through clumsiness, imprudence, inattention, negligence or failure, voluntarily or involuntarily caused incapacity for more than three months”.
The court will decide whether the hospital lacked vigilance and the doctors were negligent. One practitioner is accused of failing to prescribe antibiotics during a telephone consultation on July 23, while the other is accused of delaying examinations despite worrying blood tests.
Ms Dray claims she went to the emergency room the day after her appointment with a 39.6C fever and several signs of infection. Her case states that an intern performed tests on her, and over the phone, a doctor determined she did not require antibiotics and sent her home.
Ms Dray’s symptoms had worsened by July 24, with her legs feeling like “pieces of wood,” she told the court, according to France 3. She was returned to the emergency room after seeing her doctor in Cap Ferret, who wrote a letter to the emergency doctors recommending antibiotics.
It took nearly five hours for Ms Dray to get antibiotics, as she told the judges: “They didn’t believe me; I had to beg. They mistook me for a bourgeois performing a show.
She was then transferred to the resuscitation room that night before being admitted to intensive care days later, as the infection she had contracted progressed and became gangrene. Her limbs were amputated on August 25, 2011.
Ms Dray stated on the M6 programme Zone Interdite: “I trusted [them], and this is the situation they put me in. “I should’ve died.”
The mother has since undergone a bilateral hand and arm transplant at Penn Medicine.
The Pellegrin University Hospital in Bordeaux has already been ordered to pay Ms Dray 300,000 euros by an administrative court decision issued in January 2017.
