My mum had abdominal surgery, and one night following the surgery, she felt an extremely painful tear sensation in her lower abdomen and shortly afterwards noticed a big asymmetric lump in the intestinal area.

My partner is an ICU nurse and suspected a hernia so we took her to the local hospital and the doctor said it's just post-surgical swelling. It didn't go away, rather it got bigger, more painful and frequently gurgled, so we went to the GP. The GP said it's probably just because she's had kids 30 years ago (!?) and that my mum needs to get used to not looking attractive any more, and to lose weight.

What followed was months of doctors visits trying to get them to even accept there was even an issue. Bear in mind, this was a significant, painful gurgling lump, around the size of a tennis ball. Yet doctor after doctor said there was nothing wrong with her and she should consider therapy and antidepressants instead.

After a few more months, she began experiencing such bad pain that she couldn't walk, and finally a junior female doctor suggested she had a hernia. However, she got overruled by her senior and sent home with paracetamol. The junior doctor quietly told her to go to another hospital.

We managed to convince my mum this was ridiculous and brought her to London, where she got looked at by a hernia expert, who was very concerned about her treatment thus far and sent her for a CT and - obviously - found a large hernia. Due to the time it was left untreated, the repair was very challenging with many complications.

Back home again, while recovering, she was having the early warning signs of an infected surgical wound (hot swelling, pus, smell, chills etc.) and again the local hospital fobbed her off and said she's overreacting, didn't swab the wound or change the dressing and sent her home. That night, she called me incoherent and I called for an ambulance - turns out she had sepsis and nearly died.

I can promise you that we made sure everyone treating her had a full medical history at every point, but they still blatantly ignored what was right in front of them. There is actually a ton more to this too - the surgery in the first place which triggered all this was due to a medical error and wasn't necessary. It's been five years so far.

She's currently suing the local hospital and doctors.

In your mom’s specific case, it is inconceivable to me that any trained physician would see her post-surgical history and subsequent development of an abdominal mass and not think immediately of a hernia and possible strangulation as it grew. A first-year medical student can palpate the abdomen and readily tell there is herniation through the abdominal wall. Is it reducible or not? An abdominal CT scan should be reflexive. It’s even more maddening when more than one physician misses the obvious or at least the way it sounds to me given the information you’ve provided.

Physician burnout is a real alarming phenomenon with emergency room doctors having one of the highest rates. This was already an issue pre-COVID-19. I can’t help but worry about how worse it may get.

I can only speak to the centre I’ve worked/rotated at but this seems inconceivable based on the requisitions I get in my career. We do a lot more for a lot less.

The only point I would disagree on is that “time left untreated” can increase complication rate. If this a partially strangulated hernia and there was a microperforation (quite common and often missed) or bacterial translocation in the hernia sac mesh would almost certainly get infected. Even if not strangulated/perforated at time of surgery, if there are dense adhesions from recurrent/intermittent obstructions that may also increase operative complexity and a lysis of adhesions may contaminate the field. That said you could also just not use mesh.

In my description, it is conceivable that due to chronicity the field was contaminated at the time of second OR and/or a lysis of adhesions resulted in a contaminated field.

If the surgeon implanted mesh in a contaminated field this would be seeded and inevitably get infected.

This is not uncommon and why surgeons often don’t implant mesh in complex LOA or possibly dirty fields.

I’m not saying this is what happened, but delayed diagnosis of a complicated hernia can increase the risk of complications from repair.

The surgeon who performed the mesh repair did clearly state it was a possibility, but the hernia wasn't suitable for non-mesh repair, which would have been his preference.

There was no indication of infection or contamination at the time of the hernia repair, and the surgeon who performed the mesh believes the infection was most likely caused by poor aftercare, which was handled by the local hospital due to covid travel difficulties. Of course, he could just be saying that to cover his ass.

Mesh infection is a known risk, by your description you were appropriately consented for this.

It will be impossible to definitively identify the source of infection (I.e. was there an inadvertent enterotomy intraoperatively? Was it an inguinal hernia repair which is a relatively “dirty” region close to genitalia and a common location for surgical site infection? Did your mom develop a bacteremia for another reason and seed the implant?).

At the end of the day none of this really matters though because you were appropriately consented.

The only apparent angle for malpractice here would be if a reasonable and competent surgeon would disagree with the use of mesh and would have done a primary or two-stage repair (I.e. reduce the hernia under laparoscopy +/- small bowel resection. Bring the patient back several months later to repair the abdominal wall defect.)

If you saw a physician specializing in hernia care, I would assume that they follow best practices and this type of case was not amenable to the options I described.

If this is the case, it is incredibly unfortunate what happened to your mother. However, bad things happen and this is why we consent for complications (especially ones as devastating as mesh infection).

I wish everything I did worked and I never had complications but the only way to have no complications is to never see patients.

We are bothered by the hospital not diagnosing the hernia despite it being painfully obvious there was a hernia, which led to complications, and then ignoring the signs of infection until it got to the point where it nearly killed her.

When seen by a competent physician who appropriately consents patients understand complications.

Your issue is that your mother was misdiagnosed (at least by what was communicated on this thread) and by your description I agree.

I addressed this in further detail to one of your comments above, but for any readers I would like to also clarify this here.

Your original comment stated:

“There are quite a few incompetent doctors, sadly, and they stick together and support each other. While I'm generally reluctant to bring up identity politics, it does appear that women and people of colour tend to experience this worse than others”

You later clarified:

“Essentially my mum lives on an island nation where there is only a singular local hospital with a fairly poor reputation.”

I explained above why isolated locations such as this island with a singular hospital don’t attract recently trained/high quality physicians which is also obvious. Consequently the percentage of poor/incompetent physicians will be much higher. There are also fewer physicians for phyisican-physician consults and a singular hospital such as yours probably doesn’t have morbidity and mortality rounds and a QA program.

Therefore your experience, in an island nation with one hospital, is not representative of the modern healthcare experience and the physicians there are likely not on par with metropolitan centres.

With that said, you also choose to live in an island nation (irrespective of the reason this is a choice). That comes with the known disadvantage of poor access to quality healthcare just like every other white collar profession.

It is important to not generalize such an atypical practice setting to the general population as this is a heavily biased view.

I’m not sure what setting you practice in, I am personally in a ~1500 bed academic health sciences center.

At my institution, we have 3 general surgeons who are hernia experts (literally on their letter head). This is to say that their non ACS practice is heavily on hernia repair and they get the referrals for all complex hernia repairs from other general surgeons in the catchment area.

If you’re in a smaller setting you may not have a similar degree of sub-specialization amongst your general surgeons but hernia experts are definitely a real thing.

I appreciate your overall point and frustration, but I think you’re being a bit too dismissive here.

I also come from a large academic based health center.

Essentially my mum lives on an island nation where there is only a singular local hospital with a fairly poor reputation.

In order to get it looked at, we had to find a hospital in the UK, as that's where the private insurance covered treatment. The local hospital refused to even write a referral for further diagnosis as they considered it unnecessary as it "definitely isn't a hernia", so we had to find a surgeon that takes self-referrals. That rules out the normal NHS routes, even if attending privately.

So ultimately we found a team that specialise in treating hernias, who agreed to have my mum in after they saw a photo of her abdomen.

I think one thing to understand here is that a local hospital with a poor reputation isn't going to have the same standards as a large academic health centre. The reputation is such that good clinicians will avoid the local hospital, as they don't want to be seen to be associated with it.

Unfortunately, when you live there, you don't really have the same luxury.

I like to think I’m a good physician. At the very least I’m a highly trained subspecialty physician.

I could never work in a small community hospital with poor standards because it drives me insane to work with apathetic clinicians (100% a real thing). Additionally, given how much I trained I need to practice in a centre that can provide complexity (largely academic centres or major metropolitan non-academic sites)

This unfortunately does result in the bottom of the barrel staffing the “crappy local hospital”, but someone has to do it.

It’s unrealistic to expect high quality physicians to work on a small island nation. By choosing to live on a remote island you honestly have to accept that you’re not getting the same access to healthcare as someone in a larger city.

I’m not sure of any way to improve that.

Edit: I wanted to add that with the additional information cameronh90 has provided, in my professional opinion I can absolutely believe that his mother may have been misdiagnosed in such a practice setting.

Not uncommonly (forgive me for using this favourite word of doctors), I see egregious medical errors referred to my centre from very remote locations.

The issue in this story is not that the medical profession is apathetic, careless, negligent.

This is rather a good example of the issues in delivering quality care in remote locations. We can’t force people to move to islands and presumably an undesirable location for someone to migrate to so you end up with a higher percentage of incompetent physicians who can’t find jobs in better locations.

Most often the only times these types of practices get a recently trained physician are if the individual originally comes from there and wants to go back, a rare occurrence in my experience.

While I'm not a doctor, I'd imagine that if I was a good doctor, I'd rather work somewhere that I'm likely to get exposure to interesting cases, or hospital known for producing quality research, or a teaching hospital, or at least want to live somewhere that I could go to conferences and otherwise work with other smart people. Indeed, I moved to London for similar reasons in my career.

The way the local hospital tries to maintain some level of competence is by flying doctors over for a day or two a week, but even with that it's an uphill battle trying to attract anyone in the prime of their career. It's more of a place you go for an easy retirement, earning relatively good money but for boring work in poor facilities. Even then, the money isn't comparable to what a late stage career doctor could get working privately in Harley Street for example. We do know a few doctors (and nurses) working over there, and even if they start out enthusiastic, the system ultimately grinds them down until they're apathetic. Some leave, some just give into it.

I appreciate that you obviously can't have excellent doctors everywhere, but at the same time, I bet most individuals' interactions with healthcare are those local community hospitals and pre-retirement GPs with little enthusiasm for the job. I suppose that in healthcare, reaching the best physicians is usually a bad sign regarding your prognosis (or a very good sign regarding your bank balance).

Community hospitals can have very complex care and top talent, but not in cities with a singular hospital and island population.

Irrespective of geographic proximity, by your description this location appears to be a medical desert/medically remote. Most doctors, especially modern ones, don’t like practicing in places without a lot of other physicians for backup/support and somewhat easy access to subspecialists for referrals. Fortunately most hospitals and practice settings provide this (i.e. rural Wisconsin was UW-Madison for backup which is generally not that difficult for patient transport and is an excellent medical centre).

The issue here is not just local community hospital providing poor care. You’re taking about a very isolated practice that no one wants to work in, this is an outlier.

Ultimately, it could well have been the case that treating the hernia was not recommended, and that could have been discussed. But simply denying that there was even a hernia and refusing to perform any further investigation is clearly a failure.

As physicians were trained on the common and the deadly. We’re not that great at rare non-immediately life threatening conditions due to the nature of the discipline.

We’re trained that when you hear hooves, think horses not zebras. This does unfortunately mean that patients with zebras are often misdiagnosed for a while, but that’s because our approach isn’t intended to catch every zebra (which would be impossible).

The other element is to avoid unnecessary harm. Often the tests for zebras are nonspecific and overlap with other conditions (I.e. to be considered after exclusion of other aetiologies).

A late diagnosis of EDS fits in the zebra categories and probably wouldn’t have been picked up until you saw a rheumatologist or vascular specialist at a centre which deals with these.

I agree with your greater sentiment that people place unreal expectations on their doctors. The point is that doctors are fallible and not omniscient. This is just reality, patients need to be their own advocate.

Blame is beside the point.