MAIMED BY DOCTOR WE TRUSTED
In heartbreaking their own words, damning testimonies of the women scarred – or even sentenced to death – by NHS rogue surgeon
No one knows how many patients were butchered by Ian Paterson.
Lawyers representing families who perished under his surgical knife think the total could be above 1,000.
Here the Daily Mail reveals the harrowing stories of those who suffered at his hands including a mother who almost died during a botched operation 20 years ago.
Gill Dallow lost 11 pints of blood and her heart stopped when Paterson sliced through three major blood vessels during a routine procedure. The surgeon initially blamed faulty equipment, but his mistakes were uncovered when colleagues blew the whistle.
Mrs Dallow, who spent three days on a life support machine, sued and won £40,000 from the NHS. She was assured by managers at Good Hope Hospital in Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham, that Paterson’s work would be supervised in future. But he moved hospitals and was allowed to carry on operating.
‘If he had been reported and struck off back then none of those poor women would ever have had to suffer,’ said Mrs Dallow, 54, last night. ‘It should never have happened and it’s horrible that they have had to go through all this. It’s a horror story.’
Mrs Dallow was 34 when she was admitted to Good Hope in November 1996 for an exploratory laparoscopy – a low-risk operation to examine internal organs.
This involved Paterson pumping Mrs Dallow’s abdomen full of carbon dioxide gas to blow it up and inserting viewing tubes.
But the operation went terribly wrong within minutes. Mrs Dallow spent five hours in theatre and almost a fortnight in hospital. She later found out that a special connector attaching the instruments to the gas machine was missing. Rather than wait for the correct equipment to arrive, Paterson impatiently ordered a nurse to hold the hose to the machine by hand instead.
That meant too little gas was inside Mrs Dallow’s abdomen when Paterson roughly pushed the viewing port into it, slicing through one of the main veins to her heart and two smaller vessels. Massive internal bleeding followed.
only the transfusion of 20 pints of blood and her heart being massaged by hand on the operating table saved her life. The hospital initially banned Paterson from carrying out similar operations and launched an inquiry. A report by an independent surgeon found that he had failed to follow procedure and that he was ‘fortunate Mrs Dallow did not die’.
But Paterson gave Mrs Dallow and her family a different story.
‘He sat there and lied to our faces,’ said Mrs Dallow’s husband Nigel, a 60-year-old electrician. ‘He told us the gas machine was faulty and that an automatic guard on a scalpel had failed to initiate.
‘The next thing we had a journalist from our local paper come and see us. They had been sent an anonymous letter from a member of theatre staff who was appalled by what Paterson had done during the operation and that he was wrongly blaming the equipment.’
Mrs Dallow, from Lichfield in Staffordshire, said: ‘I was lucky to be alive. I had physical scars but the mental ones were harder to deal with. I call him Dr Frankenstein. I feel guilty because if we had managed to get him struck off he wouldn’t have put these women through all this.
‘When I look back Paterson was so arrogant. He walked around the hospital like he was God’s gift. He never apologised – no one did.
‘I have hated my body ever since. But mentally it knocked my confidence. I had to give up my job, it really affected my short-term memory and destroyed my faith in doctors and the NHS.’
I WAS A FOOL TO PUT MY FAITH IN HIM
A woman whose breast cancer spread after Paterson performed a mastectomy in just 25 minutes has found out that her case is terminal.
Barbara Lewis, 62, is now riddled with the disease. She is taking drugs which may prolong her life but doctors have told her the cancer is inoperable.
Her ‘cleavage-sparing’ procedure leaves tissue behind for cosmetic reasons but dramatically increases the risk of cancer returning. She believes Paterson experimented on patients to satisfy his own ego.
As well as calling for a public inquiry, Mrs Lewis wants executives at Heart of England NHS Trust to be held to account.
‘I put my trust and my faith in my surgeon, foolishly,’ she said. ‘I had no idea he had done this cleavagesparing operation. I didn’t even know what one was.
‘I understood it to be a full mastectomy, that I was having, a mastectomy. He was experimenting on us.’ Mrs Lewis, who lives in Birmingham with husband Reg, 67,
was referred to Paterson at Solihull Hospital, West Midlands, in 2003 over a lump in her right breast.
The operation went ahead a few weeks later. It lasted only 25 minutes – typically a mastectomy takes up to two hours.
Eighteen months later, she decided to have reconstructive surgery. Complications meant she had to spend ten days in intensive care and a further ten weeks in hospital. She was discharged and continued with chemotherapy treatment until she heard ‘mumblings’ about Paterson several years later.
In March 2012 scans revealed lesions in her head and chest. The following day she was given a terminal dignosis.
It is thought the tumours are secondary breast cancer caused by malignant tissue left in place by Paterson’s mastectomy.
In 2014 she received compensation for the initial procedure. She described it as pittance.
HE HAS GOT AWAY WITH MURDER
The family of a woman who died last month following a botched mastectomy by Paterson say he ‘got away with murder’. Michele Francis was one of Paterson’s last mastectomy patients, undergoing surgery just weeks before he ceased practising in the NHS.
Her family believe he left behind cancer-spreading lymph nodes and, four years after her operation, she received a terminal breast cancer diagnosis.
Her aunt Catherine Johnson, 70, said of Paterson: ‘He has got away with murder. He signed the death certificates for a lot of women. I feel he signed the death certificate for Michele.’
Miss Francis was just 44 when she had the mastectomy on a cancerous lump at Solihull Hospital in February 2011. Despite having been placed on stringent working conditions by the Heart of England Trust as early as 2007, Paterson continued to perform rogue operations until mid-2011.
Patients who had mastectomies by him on the NHS started being recalled between 2009 and 2011, but a review noted that the limited exercise unravelled and the process was delayed.
Despite six-month checkups, Miss Francis was not recalled and in February 2015, when she was 48, she developed a cough.
Scans were taken and Miss Francis was told by a doctor she had terminal cancer. She died on March 27 at the age of 50. ‘She thought she was better. She thought she’d beaten it’, said Steve Carter, 61, her partner of 18 years. ‘The laws in this country are not strong enough for what should be done to Paterson.’
TO PUT US THROUGH ALL THIS IS HORRIBLE
Two sisters wrongly operated on by Paterson say he experimented on them because of his ‘God syndrome’. Susan Everett was cancerfree, yet lived under the fear of the disease for 14 years due to a false diagnosis and needless operation.
During this time her younger sister Lynda Turrall, who had grade 3 cancer, was subjected to a series of inappropriate procedures.
These included a lump removal instead of a required mastectomy. Miss Turrall, 63, believes Paterson did this just to prove he was skilled enough to cure her.
Mrs Everett, 67, spent years believing her pre-cancerous cells would develop into the deadly disease, before experts told her she simply had a benign cyst.
In 2001 she had found a lump in her breast, and was referred to Paterson at the private Spire Parkway in the West Midlands thanks to her BUPA insurance. Mrs Everett, who lives in Stratford, was told by him that the lump would have to be removed for safety.
In early 2015 Mrs Everett received a phone call from police who explained that her operation presented a clear case of Paterson lying. ‘At first I was relieved because it meant I didn’t have precancerous cells’, she said. ‘Then I was angry because I’d had cancer hanging over my head for years.’
Her sister said: ‘To go through all this when it wasn’t necessary is just horrible. Why? What did he get out of it? I think it was this God syndrome. How did he pick which ones to operate on incorrectly?’
Both sisters are represented by Thompsons solicitors. But Miss Turrall stressed: ‘It’s not compensation that’s important to us, it’s that Parliament legislates to close these loopholes and stops this happening to anybody else.’