Formalin Instead of Saline Drip: Patient dies after accidentally being embalmed alive

Russia: A 27-year-old Russian woman has died after being embalmed alive due to a horrific medical blunder.

Medics put Ekaterina Fedyaeva on a formalin drip after routine surgery in her home city of Ulyanovsk, instead of connecting her to a saline one.

Formalin is a colourless solution of formaldehyde in water, which is infused into the veins of dead bodies to prevent decomposition.

Ekaterina suffered excruciating pains and convulsions for two days before falling into a coma.  She was moved to a top hospital in Moscow and awoke briefly from the coma, but doctors were not able to save her, and she died of multiple organ failures.

Her mother, Galina Baryshnikova, said the formalin had eroded Ekaterina’s body from the inside.

She said medical staff knew they had infused something wrong, but failed to take the urgent steps necessary to save her daughter.

Instead, they told her “to go home, cook chicken soup and stop worrying”.

Ekaterina was her only child.

“I spoke to the criminal investigator, and he told me it was negligence. But this is pure murder,” Galina, who buried her daughter on April 7,  said.

A criminal investigation is underway.