A Philadelphia woman is suing after a fertility doctor accidentally injected her with acid instead of saline.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Christine (who was only identified by her first name) was supposed to have saline injected into her fallopian tubes at Main Line Fertility to check for blockages. The procedure went horribly wrong.
“I felt burning,” she said. “I kept saying, ‘Something is off. Something is wrong. Is it supposed to burn?’”
Christine said the doctor, Allison Bloom, ignored her pain and left the room after finishing the procedure. Meanwhile, a nurse noticed Christine’s discomfort and told her to lay down; instead, Christine stood up, with fluid gushing down her legs, with welts on her legs so bad that it looked like boiling water had been splashed onto her skin.
Staff put cold, wet paper towels on her legs and thighs, but the pain didn’t get any better. “I don’t know what labor feels like, unfortunately, but I felt like, this is the worst thing I’ve ever experienced,” Christine said.
Eventually, the ultrasound technician checked the bottle, and realized Bloom had injected Christine with an 85% concentration of trichloroacetic acid. “All hands on deck! Get everybody in here!” Bloom yelled, as everyone rushed to work — but Christine still didn’t know what had happened.
Paramedics eventually told her after they passed two hospitals in order to get to one with a burn center. “’Oh, honey, they didn’t put saline solution through you, that was acid,’” she said they told her. “I didn’t believe him. I didn’t understand.”
A spokesperson for Main Line Fertility claims Bloom isn’t to blame. “We can share that Dr. Bloom was not responsible for the acid being in the procedure room,” they said in a statement. “She also was not involved in prefilling the syringe.”
Christine suffered first- and second-degree burns, both externally and internally. Her reproductive organs are scarred so badly that Christine said they resemble leather. Doctors asked if she would participate in a research paper, and she agreed. Meanwhile, she has permanent scars down the backs of her legs, is unable to lift children at the preschool where she works, and is in constant pain. The long-term effects, as the acid was absorbed into her body, are not known.
David Barad, an OB/GYN and reproductive endocrinologist, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that trichloroacetic acid is used occasionally to treat genital warts, but only in tiny amounts. Outside of the medical industry, it was previously used as an herbicide, and to etch metal — which speaks to how caustic it is.
“Once the stuff hits the tissue, you can’t fix it,” Barad said. “When you brush it onto tissue, it turns white because it’s basically cooking it.”
He also said it would be difficult to successfully carry a baby after such an injury. “It’s like having a garden replaced with cement,” he explained. “There’s nowhere to plant the flower.”
This kind of mistake is so serious that it was described as a “never event,” because it’s both preventable, and should never happen. “The infusion of a scarifying, burn-inducing fluid is definitely a ‘never event,’” Zane Robinson Wolf, who lectures and writes on patient safety at La Salle University’s School of Nursing and Health Science, said. “The pain of it — to be burned internally and externally — is very traumatic.”
Meanwhile, Main Line Fertility is still billing Christine and her husband, Jason, for the botched procedure, with the clinic now threatening to report them to a collections agency if they don’t pay.
“There’s not a day that goes by that you’re not reminded, ‘Oh, yeah, this happened to me,’” Christine said. “It doesn’t stop, and I feel like they just put it behind them, that it was just a blip in their day, ‘Oops a mistake was made. Carry on. Forget it ever happened.’”
