A mother who was left with parts of her unborn baby rotting inside her declared her torture was over today after the Supreme Court upheld her case against a doctor.
Ms Fiona Griffin from Cobh in Co Cork said her family would have been left homeless if Chief Justice John Murray had ruled against her six-year long medical negligence battle.
"Everything was gone if we lost. It was all or nothing," the 47-year-old mother, who was awarded €100,000 and legal costs, said.
Ms Griffin began the case against Dr Rachel Patton, an obstetrician gynaecologist at the Bon Secours Hospital in Cork, after she discovered a decaying body part, including bone, of her dead foetus was still in her womb three months after a removal operation.
Ms Griffin said: "We got justice, we won our case we were wronged and we won, we won.
"We are just so happy after six-and-a-half years of torture, real torture, we have done it for all the other women that have cases against gynaecologists as well, we have done it for everybody."
Her husband, Christopher (48), said: "We will never discuss it again in our house. Six-and-a-half-years of discussion."
The mother-of-four had an operation to remove her 17-week-old foetus after it died of natural causes in January 1998.
She believed she buried the full remains of her foetus with her late mother in Midleton cemetery "I wasn't well from once the procedure was done but the doctor wouldn't believe me."
Ms Griffin said it was her family GP, Dr Ger McLaughlin, who believed she had been left with parts of her baby rotting inside her uterus.
Ms Griffin felt the parts of her baby were scattered as she passed other pieces down the toilet.
In the High Court judgement, which was upheld, it was found the case was difficult and not routine with the advanced age of the foetus.
Dr Patton had denied negligence and appealed the case to the High Court on grounds that scans were not routinely carried out to ensure everything was removed after the operations.
The Supreme Court judgement said the case was not based on whether an ultra sound scan should have been carried out, stating "the fact of the matter is that Dr Patton had failed to remove a piece of bone some 5.5 cm in length from the uterus".
The Supreme Court's Justice Hugh Geoghegan, in a written judgement, said: "Here, it was common case among all the medical experts that a gynaecologist carrying out the procedure, which the appellant did carry out, had to take all the correct steps to ensure as far as possible that the uterus was properly evacuated and especially of the major bony structures."
The Supreme Court upheld the High Court verdict unanimously and found that Dr Patton did not carry out the assessment of what had been taken out of the uterus correctly.