“Marjorie” was a 32-year-old white woman admitted to a hospital to have her gallbladder out. Other than the fairly recent issues that led to doctors deciding to remove it, she had “no previous significant illnesses except for two abortions” that she had traveled to another state to undergo. (These legal induced abortions had, interestingly, been noted by doctors under the “significant illness” category.) The second abortion had been only a few weeks before Marjorie came to the hospital.
When the hospital performed a pre-op examination, Marjorie appeared to be healthy enough to undergo surgery. What the doctors didn’t realize was how strongly her recent abortion would affect her post-operative outcome.
The gallbladder (and to a lesser extent, the appendix) were confirmed to have been diseased upon removal. Marjorie began to recover and it seemed that she would be fine, but then a latent side effect of the recent abortion began to manifest. When she tried to walk, she went into respiratory distress and quickly became unresponsive. CPR failed and she died two days after what should have been a fairly uneventful surgery.
Marjorie’s autopsy, performed two hours after her death, finally revealed what was happening even before being admitted to the hospital. Her left thigh was mottled and unusually enlarged. A branched, firm clot impacted in her pulmonary conus had distended the right atrium and ventricle of her heart. The clot was analyzed and found to be a thromboembolus. She had been killed by a post-abortion pulmonary embolism. It was concluded that an occult venous thrombus had been formed before the gallbladder removal (with her recent abortion as a significant contributing factor and likely cause), which was then dislodged from her left leg and blocked the pulmonary conus.
In addition to the embolism itself, Marjorie had slight serosanguineous peritoneal effusions, congestion of the lungs and pulmonary edema. Her left ovary contained a hemorrhagic corpus luteum.
The doctors who submitted Marjorie’s case to a medical journal warned that “The current increase in abortions necessitates specific inquiry and careful examination in young women and probably should indicate delay of all except emergency surgery for a period of at least six months.”
No comments:
Post a Comment