I get the creeps just thinking about this

Picture this, you go in to the hospital for surgery, they fix you up and you go home. A few weeks later you are told that the instruments used by the medical staff during your surgery were sterilized in hydraulic fluid instead of soap. Apparently it happened when workers working on elevators at least two North Carolina hospitals drained old hydraulic fluid into empty soap containers, then the containers were somehow sent back to the soap distributor, who then sent them back to the hospital as new soap. That is just mind boggling that this even happened, you would think someone along the way would have noticed something was wrong. Some workers apparently complained of slippery instruments, but I am sure they would never have guessed that it was hydraulic fluid instead of soap that made them slippery.

Apparently something like this has never happened before, so no one truly knows if the affected patients will suffer any long term effects from this or not. I would bet that many of them will suffer mentally just from the uncertainty over whether they will recover or not. I am sure many lawsuits will be forthcoming over this, there were probably lawyers on their way there as soon as the story broke.

Hopefully the patients will all be okay, but I would be worried too if I was one of those people.

Here is the story if you want to read it, from AP via Yahoo:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050812/ap_on_he_me/dirty_surgical_instruments;_ylt=AvX8PbJleOG5zDX1xQXRts2s0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MjBwMWtkBHNlYwM3MTg-