Patient Made to Drink Formaldehyde

Hungarian police are launching an investigation into how a 69-year-old woman consumed formaldehyde at a hospital the morning she was to undergo a routine operation.

According to the Hungarian daily Blikk, nurses at a hospital in the western town of Sopron unwittingly asked the patient to drink from a bottle of formalin, a substance made up in part of formaldehyde, which had been inexplicably placed at her bedside table.

Margit Varnagy arrived at the hospital on November 15, the day before she was to have hemorrhoid surgery. Nurses placed two pitchers of a liquid – which they believed to be a bowel-cleansing fluid – beside her bed and told her to drink it before her operation the following day.

The 69-year-old patient took a couple of swigs from the liquid and immediately felt a burning sensation in her throat and stomach, as well as numbness in her arm. She rang for the nurse and who told her not to drink so fast.

Seven hours later, as she was about to be wheeled into the operating theater, she complained to the doctor that she was not feeling very well after imbibing the liquid. The doctor took a sniff from the pitcher and hurried out of the room.

Mrs. Varhegy was rushed by helicopter to the toxicology ward of a Budapest hospital. Her recovery is expected to last several weeks.