When you undergo surgery, you expect your doctor to do everything in their power to ensure you get the best care and treatment possible.
Unfortunately for Ethel Easter, her experience was the opposite.
Easter’s concern started when her doctor was rude to her when she questioned why she had wait two months to have hernia surgery to treat what she described as “stabbing pains every time she ate”.
“I was like, ‘I can’t wait for two months. I’m terribly ill’, and he said, ‘Listen’ — he got very abrupt. He said ‘Who do you think you are? You have to wait just like everybody else’,” the Texas resident told Fox 28 news.
Unable to change doctors due to her health insurance plan, Easter felt like she had no choice but to stick with the surgeon, despite feeling uncomfortable in his care.
“I was afraid that if I didn’t make it [through surgery] nobody would know why, and I wanted them to know it was because he didn’t care about me as a person,” she told Yahoo! Beauty.
Easter decided to take matters into her own hands and hid a small recording device in her hair extensions to record the surgeon and his team during her operation.
Listening back to their conversation afterwards, Easter was shocked to hear several disgusting comments made about her while she was under anesthetic.
“She’s a handful. She had some choice words for us in the clinic when we didn’t book her case in two weeks,” the surgeon is heard saying to another male in the room. “I’m going to call a lawyer and file a complaint,” he continues before laughing.
“That doesn’t seem like the thing to say to the person whose going to do your surgery,” the other male replies.
Staff can also be heard body shaming Easter and making offensive remarks about her appearance.
“Did you see her belly button?” says a female voice on the tape laughing, while another male staff member says to the anesthesiologist, “Precious, meet Precious.”
“It was ‘Precious, meet Precious’, as though I was this big fat black woman,” Easter said, referring to a character played by actress Gabourey Sidibe in the movie Precious.
Staff also said they “felt sorry” for her husband.
While she is not currently pursuing legal action against the hospital staff, Easter wants people to be aware of what’s going on while vulnerable people are in surgery.
“When you are lying there and these people have you uncovered and you trust them and they speak like this, it’s a bad situation. It’s given me self-esteem issues,” she told Yahoo.
Fox28 reports that Harris Health Systems said they could not comment because of confidentiality laws but a letter Easter received claimed the company had used the incident “as an opportunity to teach staff about being mindful.”
Have you ever had a bad experience with medical staff?
Top Comments
Personnally I couln't care less about what the surgeon and staff say about me during surgery (unless they plan on killing me and selling my body parts during a follow-up surgery or something :P), as long as the surgery is done properly. I would be more concerned by the surgeon's behavior prior to the surgery. Reassuring the patient was part of his job... whatever the surgery, as a patient, you feel exposed and worried. But we only have one side of the story here. I agree with the importance of reporting incidents though.
What's the other side of the story that would make it acceptable (in your eyes) for a doctor and a colleague to make jokes about her private parts?
When did that happen? I heard nothing about her private parts!
Ladies (and gentlemen), I cannot emphasise how important it is that these incidents, and any incidents that you might be aware of, are reported. If you are the subject of mistreatment at the hands of your health professional, speak up! Report them to AHPRA or their local authoritative body. The unfortunate consequence if you don't do that is that they will will do the same thing over and over until someone brings them up on it. There are doctors, midwives, nurses, GPs and many others who have long histories of the same unprofessional behaviour occurring over and over again who have only been exposed when multiple people have come forward to report exactly the same actions over and over.
TL;DR: if you don't report what happened to you, it's going to keep happening. Trust me.
I think pre-op checklists of patients might be quite a bit more thorough following this incident. However, as rude as the staff were, I wonder if some of her anguish has been assuaged from her new found minor celebrity status?
Hi Zepgirl ... as a woman who has always battled weight. I had my first surgery about 2 years ago in my early 30s, thankfully on my upper body so I didn't feel so exposed, but I did have to have a curette last year after a failed miscarriage and walking into a room of about 11 people (why so many?), and over half being men, it was the most humiliating experience of my life and quite traumatic. Reading articles like this and your comments leads me to believe that this sort of unprofessional behaviour is not uncommon and makes me feel very ill at ease. I suppose you think your fellow female may have your back in these sorts of surgical situation whereby you are exposed and vulnerable, but I suppose that other case of the woman having her genitals photographed just proves that women can be anti-social as well! What a sad society we live in, that we can't trust people who we are forced to place our trust in.
Just went through a process with APRAH and it was a total waste of time. They protect their own. They don't even explain their rational for their findings. They can say anything then not have to explain. Even the ombudsman who I turned to for help to get them to explain the rational for their findings said they don't have to and basically told me to go away in polite ombudsman speak "the matter is closed!" APRAH refused my application for documents used under freedom of information, citing 'confidentiality' because we went down the path of an APRAH notification, the hospital staff have been ordered to not speak to me about the surgery so I still don't have answers... Unless the surgeon has done something so bad to be struck off, they don't get a mark against their name. I was hoping our surgeon would at least have to explain and apologise to us, but no... he can go on and do this to someone else. not so much what was done, but how he avoided the issue afterward he never had to explain.
I'm so sorry you went through that, that's absolutely appalling :(