Johannesburg - Picture after graphic picture showed parts of a woman’s body, mutilated and scarred.
A right breast, the nipple coloured with patches of black, covered with three small tapes making the shape of a triangle around it. Underneath the breast, a horizontal cut - sutured, yet still with segments visibly open, and pus oozing out.
Further down her body, a visibly septic cut across her lower abdomen also bearing blackened scarring, and the belly button above has a black ring around it. The next picture - a gaping septic hole where the cut had been on her lower abdomen.
Eizabeth Edwards, the woman whose body was pictured, narrated her ordeal to a Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) hearing committee on Monday.
She recounted how with each passing week after her breast reduction, liposuction and tummy-tuck surgery at the hands of Dr Luke Gordon in July 2006, her body went from bad to worse.
Gordon, a plastic surgeon from Benoni who owns Metamorphis Clinic, is facing 13 charges relating to unprofessional conduct emanating from various cases in which he was allegedly negligent or incompetent.
The allegations are that Gordon failed to meet the standard of care that could reasonably be expected from a plastic and reconstruction surgeon.
Gordon, who has already pleaded guilty on two of the counts, appeared stoic as Edwards gave her testimony and detailed the scarring on her body.
On Monday, the lawyer representing the 13 complainants, Thabang Baloyi, went through each graphic picture of Edwards’s wounds on an overhead projector.
Edwards had initially consulted Gordon on May 30, 2006 after searching on Google as she had wished to have her 36DD breasts reduced.
Edwards testified how her surgery was initially scheduled for June 28, 2006 but moved to about 10am on July 3 (same year) as the anaesthetist Gordon usually worked with was unavailable. Pre-op, she said she recollected asking to see the anaesthetist to tell him that she was asthmatic, but had only seen Gordon’s nursing assistant before being wheeled into theatre.
She recalled how she had been given premedication before surgery, and woke up at Life the Glynnwodd Hospital in searing pain.
“I woke up at about 6pm on the day of the surgery and I called the nursing staff and asked for medicine, but no one responded. At about 11pm, a sister came to me and gave me two containers with two pills inside and told me I should have received the other two earlier,” she stated.
When her husband picked her up from hospital, Edwards testified she was in severe pain.
Edwards and her husband began taking pictures of her scars two days after her surgery and continued for weeks thereafter.
Edwards said she was devastated at how the surgery had turned out.
During cross-examination, Gordon’s lawyer, Shadrich Mothibe, argued Edwards had signed a consent form to allow the surgery and the form had explicit paragraphs citing possible risk associated with the surgeries.