A Co Louth woman told the High Court yesterday that she "cried and cried" after being told by Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda, that the doctor who had removed her womb in 1992 was under investigation.
Mrs Alison Gough (37) said she was devastated when she was told by a gynaecologist, Dr Michael Neary, that he had removed her womb at the age of 27 in October 1992 following the performance of a Caesarean operation at the birth of her only child.
Mrs Gough, of Market House Lane, Ardee, has sued Dr Neary, of Fair Street, Drogheda, and the hospital for negligence. The doctor and hospital claim the action is statute-barred and deny Mrs Gough's claims.
Mrs Gough broke down and cried throughout her evidence. She said that as a result of what she had heard and read in the media she had hoped it had nothing to do with her. What had bothered her was the number of women involved.
She learned from a television programme that the hospital had established a help line. She had contacted the line hoping she would be told that what she had learned was not true and that Dr Neary was not the doctor being investigated.
But she was told he was being investigated for performing unneccessary hysterectomies.
Asked by her counsel, Mr Turlough O'Donnell SC, how she had reacted to that information she replied: "I just cried and cried. I felt really I could have stopped it. I should have said something. I thought I was only the third person but there were so many other women."
Mrs Gough said that in 1998 she had tried to help herself by going to counselling for a year but did not find it benefited her. She just could not get any of the answers she wanted. She decided to try and forget about the whole affair and to get on with her life.
She felt she was wasting too much time and too much of her life and her young son, Damien's, life.
Prof John Bonnar, a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist, said it was extremely rare that a woman having her first baby should have Caesarean and hysterectomy operations. In 100,000 pregnancies in Dublin there had been only one record of a patient having such operations. That one case, he understood, was where the placenta was in front of the baby, and that could be associated with very severe haemorrhaging.
He had never to do a Caesarean hysterectomy on a woman having her first child. The condition would arise in perhaps one in 5,000 births in women who had had children.
Prof Bonnar said Dr Neary had carried out the Caesarean-hysterectomy operations because of what he (Dr Neary) described in a letter to the patient's GP as a continual massive bleeding.
He said that it appeared from the times in the records that Mr Neary went straight from doing the Caesarean operation to the carrying out of the hysterectomy. He got the impression there had been considerable haste leading to the hysterectomy.
The hearing continues today.