The NSW medical watchdog has begun a fresh investigation into a disgraced gynaecologist Emil Shawky Gayed, whose actions led to the death of one patient and left many others suffering the effects of unnecessary surgeries.
The Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC) also confirmed the investigation would examine management at the Manning Rural Referral hospital in Taree where Gayed worked, including whether staff working with him failed to report errors or concerns.
“The commission has received a complaint from the Hunter New England Local Health District in relation to potential patients of concern arising from the treatment provided by Dr Gayed,” a spokesman said.
“The commission has determined that the complaint will be investigated and this investigation is commencing. If an investigation also identifies other persons or practitioners with potential knowledge, information or involvement, the commission has powers to receive information from them, and other practitioners can also be formally added to the investigation.”
Earlier in June Gayed was banned from practising medicine for three years after the HCCC accused him of professional misconduct in relation to seven patients. The new investigation follows revelations by Guardian Australia that dozens of women in and around Taree had suffered because of treatment they received by Gayed. A medical lawyer in Sydney with Carroll & O’Dea, Bill Madden, said since Guardian Australia’s reports several women had approached his firm with complaints about Gayed, and that lawyers would be travelling to Taree next week to speak with them.
One of the dozens of women affected by Gayed told Guardian Australia that he needlessly removed her ovaries while performing a hysterectomy on her on 18 July 2013. The woman, who can only be identified as Kelly, told Gayed she wanted to keep her fallopian tubes because she was recently married and she and her husband wanted to try to have children using a surrogate. She was 35 when Gayed performed the hysterectomy, and said she found it odd that he did not come to her bed afterwards to debrief her on the operation.
“I was lying in the hospital bed feeling really really hot and sick, my hair was falling out and I was a mess,” she said. “I kept ringing Dr Gayed and he wouldn’t answer his phone. Then I got to use the nurse’s station phone and he answered. I asked him when he was coming to see me and he said he would send his other staff to come and see me, and asked what the problem was. I told him I felt hot, and I didn’t feel like me. He kept saying he really couldn’t come and see me.”
A nurse later came into her room and asked her if she was OK.
“She came and sat beside me and said, ‘Kelly, you don’t have your ovaries, you’re going through early menopause’,” she said. “I said to her, ‘no I’m not,’ and she said ‘yes, you are’.”
“That’s when I realised … He’d taken my ovaries.”
When her husband came to visit her, Kelly said she didn’t want to see him.
“When we got married he said he wanted to have my babies,” she said. “I couldn’t break the news to him. I felt I’d let him down.”
Four days after her surgery, Kelly was discharged from the hospital although she was still feeling severely unwell. She keeps a meticulous diary, and in it has notes of all of her hospital stays and appointments with Gayed. Her diary entry from the day she left hospital reads: “I feel really sick and hot. I have spoken to the nurse about me not feeling well. I was told I had to go home but they need my bed.”
The next day she went to see Gayed in his private rooms to tell him she was not feeling well and was vomiting so much she had to bring a bucket with her to the appointment.
“He told me I needed to go home and have a good fart and a shit,” Kelly said.
By Thursday morning she was so unwell she was scared to be left alone by her husband. Her husband needed to run some errands and dropped Kelly off at her parents house so they could look after her while he was gone.
“My husband never made it back to pick me up again,” Kelly said. “I became more unwell at my parents house and was taken by hospital to an ambulance. I couldn’t keep anything down and I smelt really, really bad.”
At the hospital Kelly said as nurses took the bandage off her hysterectomy surgery wound, it “exploded”. “It started seeping out everywhere,” she said. She had developed a serious infection.
Her diary entries reveal her fear, and that she was in severe pain. On 26 July Kelly wrote: “I feel really sick, the nurses are coming in and out all the time … I am in so much pain and just want to cry.”
On 29 July she wrote; “I still feel like I’m dying. I have not seen Dr Gayed since I came back in here. I keep asking the nurses where he is.”
On 31 July Kelly was visited by a surgeon who she described as a “guardian angel”. He told her he was taking her to theatre to clean out the infection and promised not to leave her side until she had been operated on. Kelly told him she did not want Gayed anywhere near her.
After being released from hospital the next month, in August, Kelly had to travel back to the clinic every day for more than four months to have her wound cleaned. She had to wear a vacuum dressing the entire time. She was also put on antidepressants and sleeping pills as she struggled to cope with losing her ovaries and knowing she would not be able to use her eggs and find a surrogate to carry her children. She still struggles with the trauma.
In August 2013, she had a follow-up appointment with Gayed in relation to her hysterectomy. Kelly said she didn’t want to go but knew it might be her only chance for her and her husband to get their questions answered.
“I asked him ‘why did you take my ovaries out?’. He said he took them just in case I got cancer. The lab results found there was no cancer in my ovaries. There was nothing wrong with them. Gayed said now they were gone at least I wouldn’t be coming back to him in five to seven years with cancer.”
She said Gayed told her he had been a doctor for many years and he knew what he was doing.
“I said ‘I think you fucked up my hysterectomy and you know it’. He then asked me to leave. There were people in the waiting room as I left and I said to them ‘I wouldn’t see him, he’s a hacker,’ and then his secretary told me to leave too.”
Kelly contacted a law firm in the town to see if she could take action against Gayed but was told they could not help her.
“I was told, ‘We can’t touch him, he has been working here for over 10 years’. I was going through so much and I just thought there was no point pursuing it further. I thought I was the only one.”
She said she was horrified and shocked to learn recently that so many other women had been affected by Gayed.
“I don’t want money, because that won’t bring my ability to have children back,” she said. “ I want him to never practise again and for people to know what he did.”
-
Do you know more? contact melissa.davey@theguardian.com
