year-old Saudi woman has filed a complaint against King Khaled National Guard Hospital in Jeddah for allegedly removing her right ureter without her knowledge. She has demanded that action be taken against the medical team that supervised the procedure, in particular the head of the urinary tract surgery department at the hospital. Ureters are muscular tubes that propel urine from the kidneys to the urinary bladder. Abdulrahman Al-Maghribi, the Director of Public Relations at the hospital, confirmed that a complaint had been laid and that the institution's Shariah Medical Committee was considering the matter. He said strict penalties would be imposed if the committee finds any wrongdoing. The woman, identified only as N.A., visited the hospital last year to be treated for pain. The doctors decided to conduct an urgent operation to “widen” the ureter. She claimed that it later turned that the operation was unnecessary. But it was not widened. It was removed, the woman claimed. The woman said that after undergoing several operations to rectify her medical condition, she decided to travel abroad to get checked up by another urologist, who confirmed that her right ureter was removed, causing inflammation in her urinary bladder. “Then I remembered how the doctors were nervous while giving me local anesthesia at the National Guard Hospital,” she said. When the doctor who operated on her at the National Guard Hospital was approached for comment about the alleged error, he denied that he had made a mistake. He said the woman was suffering from a small hole in her ureter, which had healed naturally.
