A criminal probe has been launched after a 27-year-old Russian woman was allegedly embalmed alive. The doctor injected the woman, identified as Ekaterina Fedyaeva, with a drug that is used to stop corpses from decomposing.
Fedyaeva's mother has accused the medical staff of murdering her daughter after they put her on a drip containing formaldehyde, a chemical used to preserve corpses, instead of a saline drip.
The woman died in Moscow last week.
Last month, Fedyaeva was at a hospital in Ulyanovsk for her routine checkup when the staff accidentally placed her on a formalin drip. She was flown to Moscow for emergency treatment after the medical blunder.
"This is pure murder," her mother, Galina Baryshnikova, told Mail Online. "[It] was simply eroding her body from inside."
According to Russian news agency TASS, she suffered pain for two days before falling into a coma. She was then rushed to Moscow's A.I. Burnazyan Federal Medical and Biophysical Center. Medics used around 52 different drugs to save her, but she died of multiple organs failure.
"Her legs were moving, she had convulsions, her whole body was shaking," Baryshnikova said. "I put socks on her, then a robe, then a blanket, but she was shivering to such an extent, I can't even describe it. No doctor came to see her although she was coming round from anesthetic."
"The formalin was simply eroding her body from the inside," Baryshnikova said, accusing the medical staff of killing her daughter. "People who performed the surgery already knew that they infused something wrong. They needed to take some urgent measures, but they did nothing."
Baryshnikova said she requested the hospital staff to help save her daughter, but she was told to go home. "I think they just wanted me to go away and to hide everything," she said.
The Russian website reported that Ulyanovsk's minister of health, Rashid Abdullov, offered condolences to Fedyaeva's family. Abdullov said the doctors noticed the mistake after two minutes and immediately performed the procedure to wash the formalin out. He also said that the staff, which made the mistake, has been dismissed.
The name of the hospital in Ulyanovsk has not been revealed.
