Mom dies in hospital 'mistake'
2007-11-29 07:59
Johannesburg - An East Rand mother of two died a gruesome death when a student nurse allegedly administered a large quantity of heartburn remedy to her intravenously, by mistake.
Monica Fourie, 40, of Geduld, Springs, collapsed in front of her husband, Japie, also 40, and apparently choked to death in Far East Rand Hospital.
It happened seconds after he saw a "sizeable" quantity of thick, milky medicine being injected into her drip.
She was supposed to have drunk the heartburn remedy.
"It was horrible," said Fourie tearfully on Wednesday.
He took her to hospital last Wednesday with acute stomach cramps and diarrhoea.
"I went in with her, because she was afraid.
Was put on a drip
"The doctor examined her behind a curtain and asked her if she'd eaten chicken. Then he prescribed some medicine."
They went to another section where the nurses were supposed to administer the medication.
"They gave her a glucose drip. Then the student nurse came along and took the folder. She spoke to three others, but I didn't understand what they were saying."
"A short while later, the student nurse returned with what appeared to me, from my days on the farm, to be a syringe used to inject fluids into cattle, because it was so big. It was full of a milky substance.
"She pushed the needle directly into the eye of the intravenous drip and when she began to inject the fluid my wife shouted 'Ow!'.
"I even joked with her that she needn't be so afraid of an injection."
"When the syringe was empty my wife collapsed. She was purple in the face and blotches were appearing all over her body.
"She gurgled so that it sounded as if someone had cut her throat."
Doctors tried in vain to resuscitate her.
Fourie, contacted the police on the advice of Marianne von Molendorff, his sister-in-law who is an assistant nurse at another hospital.
Fourie said the staff had claimed initially that they had injected an antibiotic.
However, he told a detective that the watery substance in the small glass ampule they showed him looked completely different from the milky fluid he had seen.
One of the staff apparently told the student nurse, while Fourie was within earshot: "It won't help if we lie, he saw you, he was there!"
Fourie said the doctor told him that he had prescribed amphojel (aluminium hydroxide) for his wife.
The pathologist initially gave the cause of death on her death certificate as lung infection and wrote that she had been very ill.
However, after several phone calls and threats of police action, he was forced to carry out another investigation into the cause of death.
Forensic tests being done
A new death certificate was issued on Wednesday afternoon, stating that she had not died of natural causes.
A police inspector confirmed to Beeld newspaper that the death was being investigated and forensic tests were being conducted.
Zanele Mngadi of Gauteng Health Department said on Wednesday that a nurse and two student nurses had been suspended pending an inquiry.
Fourie is survived by her husband, a 16-year-old son, Andre, and a 20-year-old daughter, Charlene van Vuuren.