Nadine Shams: A life that shouldn't have been taken

Scriptwriter Nadine Shams died after a routine operation, in what her family say is a case of medical negligence

“Nadine Shams, talented Egyptian script writer, dead at the age of 41”
“Her family accuses the hospital of negligence leading to her death”
“Shams went to the hospital to remove a cyst on her uterus hoping she can give life to a new baby, but hers was taken away”
These were some of the headlines that described the death of scriptwriter Nadine Shams earlier this month. But to me and to most of her friends and family, they all seem unreal. How can she be dead? She was the toughest among us. She never left a cause without fighting and winning.
I will never forget 11 February 2011, the day when Mubarak stepped down following the 25 January Revolution. We were very happy; there was a state of victory and euphoria in the streets.
I saw her at the Bourse café in downtown Cairo, where we used to take a break from the Tahrir sit-in, and I hugged her and screamed "congratulations!" She waved her little Egyptian flag and chanted "civil state, not religious nor military!"
How right she was. It was too early to celebrate; the fight was yet to come against the military and the religious state. It was too early to leave the square; we are still paying the price for not listening to her wisdom.
Her wisdom was not only revolutionary; she also was the best adviser on matters of the heart, on work and ironically on health matters. She used to write the script of a TV health show a long time ago and I found it a challenge when I took the job later to live up to the naturalness and beauty of her writing.
When she went to have an operation earlier this month she was accompanied by her friends Elham and Olfat. They were all smiling and laughing; Nadine looked very healthy and Elham had a cold, so the doctors though Elham was the patient, not Nadine.
But she introduced herself and told him the exact diagnosis in medical terms. The doctor asked if she was also a doctor. She smiled and said she knew her case by heart, like a medical school student.
Nadine shouldn't have died. She should have lived a long and healthy life, with her loving partner of over 15 years, Nabil El-Qot. She should have lived and gone on to have beautiful children that would have shared those qualities that made her so special – her hardworking spirit, her honesty, her patience and her concern for others.
Nadine's death was shocking to her family and friends not because she was young, beautiful and active. Not because sheloved life and had many dreams she deserved to live and realise, but because she shouldn't have died for nothing like this.
She went to the hospital to remove a fibroid on her uterus and she should have been out in a few hours healed and hopefully able to now bear the offspring of her 15-year-long fairytale love story with Nabil.
But 12 hours after the operation, she was screaming in pain. Her husband and her best friend, both doctors, suspected something had gone wrong during the operation, but the doctors kept denying it and telling them the pain was natural. They kept sedating her while the poison was spreading through her body.
After three days of torture, the doctors finally admitted that they had done something wrong in the operation; they suspected colon perforation during the surgery that led to fecal peritonitis and septicaemia.
They operated again but couldn't find the hole in her colon. They said that maybe it was a microscopic hole that healed itself, and cleaned up and promised she would get better. She didn't. She was deteriorating very fast. Again the doctors kept denying that something went wrong during in the operations and promised she would get better.
During her 10-day stay in intensive care, they didn't perform any tests. They refused to let any doctors visit her to see what was going on. Only a day before she died, they finally allowed two doctors to visit her. One ordered an immediate CT scan. I wonder how this did not occur to the hospital. The second said she had to be moved out of the hospital because she would die, but she died before she could be transferred.
The hospital kept giving us fake hope that she was getting better, that they would try to remove the ventilator, that her resistance was good -- that was the only thing they probably didn't lie about, as she was resisting until the very end.
She wanted to live, she didn't want to let go, but they were too arrogant to allow her, too arrogant to recognise their mistakes or try to fix them.
To date, the hospital refused to give us an adequate explanation about why Shams died. They were more interested in saving the surgeon's reputation than saving her life. They killed her three times -- once when they made a fatal surgical mistake, then when they denied that they had made a mistake and were very late in trying to fix it, and finally when they were too arrogant to recognise that they couldn't save her life and she need to see a specialist they couldn't provide her with.
The surreal death of Shams throws light on the ongoing problems of corruption and negligence in Egypt, showing how cheap Egyptian lives are. We die at protests, because of accidents, in universities, factories, trains, boats, stadiums, and when we go to hospitals hoping to be saved we are killed in cold blood.
May her painful death be the alarm that saves hundreds of lives from medical negligence in Egyptian hospitals.
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Scriptwriter Nadine Shams died on Saturday 22 March.
Her husband, Nabil El-Qott, has filed a complaint demanding a forensic doctor determine the cause of death, alleging medical negligence. Investigations are currently ongoing.
Shams was a graduate of the High Cinema Institute. She wrote several short stories and specialised in script writing. She wrote several films includingEhna Etkabelna Abl Kida(We've Met Before), a 2008 film starring Egyptian actress Nelly Kareem.
She also worked on many TV programmes, including the popular series Moga Harra (Heatwave) last Ramadan.
http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/97958.aspx