A 27-year-old woman died after she was embalmed alive as doctors mistakenly put her on a formalin drip, containing formaldehyde, instead of saline.
Ekaterine Fedyaeva was admitted for a routine surgery to a hospital in the city of Ulyanovsk in Russia, where the incident took place, International Business Times reports.
She was in hospital for an unspecified but routine surgery when she was injected with formalin, normally infused into the veins of the dead to prevent decomposition.
Her mother accused physicians of “murder” following the incident in her home city of Ulyanovsk, Russia.
Ekaterina suffered horrible pains and convulsions for two days before falling into a coma.
She was attached to a life support machine but her heart stopped beating several times.
After being flown to another hospital, in Moscow, she briefly woke from her coma before dying of multiple organ failure.
Her mother Galina Baryshnikova and husband Igor were with her when she came round from the surgery in her ward.
“Her legs were moving, she had convulsions, her whole body was shaking,” said her mother.
“I put socks on her, then a robe, then a blanket but she was shivering to such an extent, I can’t even describe it.
“No doctor came to see her although she was coming round from anaesthetic.”
The bereaved mother said: “We had no idea it was formalin. Now I understand that formalin was simply eroding her body from the inside.
“People who performed the surgery already knew that they infused something wrong. They needed to take some urgent measures – but they did nothing.”
Galina says she begged doctors to help but claims they told her to go home, adding: “I begged – ‘please help her, she is my only child’.”
“I think they just wanted me to go away and to hide everything.”
Ekaterina was rushed to intensive care overnight as her condition deteriorated.
“For 14 hours after surgery she was living with this formalin and they did nothing,” she said.
Galina went in search of doctors and found them in a huddle “discussing how to tell us that a terrible mistake had been made”.
According to U.K.’s Mirror Online, medics at the regional clinic reportedly used over 50 different drugs in an attempt to save Fedyaeva’s life before she was flown to another hospital in Moscow. However, the young woman’s life could not be saved.
Categorised in: Death
This post was written by Nadia Vella