Dead Rodent Stops Surgery
Posted March 7, 2008 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The only thing stopping a hospital patient in England from having a surgery he’d been waiting for for almost a year was the horrid stench of a dead rodent.
A patient was told there was no reason why he couldn’t have the operation, despite the smell caused by a dead rat trapped in the building’s ceiling.
Andrew Cowper was due to have an operation at the Queen Elizabeth II hospital in Hertfordshire when staff “were made aware of a dead rodent in the single storey unit’s roof space,” the hospital said in a statement.
The hospital said its experts concluded that the dead animal was outside the operating theater and posed no risk.
But “despite being told that the trust’s infection control experts had stated that Mr. Cowper was not being exposed to an infection risk, he decided not to proceed with the operation,” it said.
Cowper, 19, told media he had waited 11 months for the surgery, and the doctor told him he could go ahead despite the pungent smell.
“He said the smell didn’t represent a health risk, but I was appalled,” Cowper said. “I asked him: ‘If you were me, would you have the operation?’ He looked at me and said ‘no’, so I decided there and then I wasn’t going to go ahead.”
