Mistakes, negligence, pressure: Why routine surgeries go wrong

A 34-year-old woman from Jaipur woke up paralysed from waist down after receiving a spinal anaesthesia for her Caesarean section, a routine step for millions of births every year. An MRI showed a rare spinal bleed squeezing her lower spinal cord and nerves. A team led by neurosurgeons at Mahatma Gandhi University of Medical Sciences and Technology operated on her to remove the spinal clot.

One of the neurosurgeons, Dr Anmol Singh Randhawa, later wrote about her ordeal in a 2025 paper published in Surgical Neurology International. It took three months for the new mother to regain leg strength, bladder and bowel control, and dodge life-long wheelchair use.