A Port Elizabeth woman has won a 10-year legal battle after a surgeon nicked her bile duct during an operation to remove her gall bladder, says a Sunday Times report.

Following a defeat in the High Court, Felicia Meyers (51) finally succeeded at the SCA, which ruled that surgeon Richard Vogel had been negligent. The court held the Eastern Cape Health MEC liable for Meyers’ damages and ordered that the state pay her legal fees.

The botched operation left Meyers, who was a security guard, living in poverty and unable to work for years.

She spent a decade fighting Vogel, Livingstone Hospital and the Eastern Cape Health MEC.

Three of the five SCA judges who heard her case said the doctor could have prevented her further injuries and ruled it was up to Health MEC Sindiswa Gomba to resolve the problem.

In the majority judgment, Judge Visvanathan Ponnan said Vogel had not been able to explain Meyers’s internal injuries because he could not remember the operation, but the surgeon had had to accept that the instrument he used to close her wounds was faulty.

Ponnan said the testimony of Meyers, as well as that of expert witness Dr Hendrik Pienaar, a senior surgery lecturer at the University of Pretoria, was sufficient to demonstrate negligence on Vogel’s part.

‘No reasonable suggestion has been offered as to how the injury could have occurred, save for negligence on the part of Dr Vogel,’ he said.

Full Sunday Times report (subscription needed)

Judgment