This is despite complications from a previous botched procedure where the hospital left a surgical needle inside her body, SaharaReporters was told.
A 65-year-old woman, Margaret Mowalola Akinduntire, has died after the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH) allegedly refused to perform a critical surgery, citing the recent Ramadan fasting.
This is despite complications from a previous botched procedure where the hospital left a surgical needle inside her body, SaharaReporters was told.
In an exclusive interview with SaharaReporters, her son recounted a harrowing series of encounters with LASUTH spanning over a decade, alleging gross negligence and abandonment by the state-run hospital.
“In 2013, they operated on her because of kidney problem then. I think it was the right kidney. They had to take that out in 2013 and year later, 2014, we were in the sitting room that day, when something just pierced her at the same point she did her surgery. She touched it and she realised it was a sharp something. We did not know what it was then. We had to start making calls, and she made calls to the people there in the hospital. And she had to go there. This time they did not even give her the drug that would not make her not to feel the pain in LASUTH.
“They had to open her again while she was still very conscious. She was seeing and feeling the pain when they were reopening her. Guess what they found inside her? It was a needle. It was the needle they used in stitching during the first surgery. How could a general hospital for that matter forget needle inside someone? My family wanted to put the case then but I could not really recall what happened later that made them to stop it.”
The son said although she later underwent a successful leg surgery, a fibroid diagnosis in 2024 brought her back under LASUTH’s care— and into another wave of negl
