Like so many Australians, Maya Tesa was raised to believe our healthcare system was the envy of the world.
But after being treated for burns at a prestigious Victorian hospital – named one of the world’s best in a poll just four years ago – Ms Tesa says it is our national shame.
The mother of four, 41, claims she was left so starved and dehydrated under the hospital’s care that she believes it triggered back-to-back heart attacks.
She also accuses the hospital staff of leaving her to sit in her own urine and regularly serving her plastic fruit cups with flies buzzing around inside.
Her harrowing ordeal began on January 27 when she was cleaning a sandwich maker at her home in the north-eastern Melbourne suburb of Eltham.
‘I turned on the sandwich press to warm up the toastie to peel if off easier,’ Ms Tesa tells me.
‘I was wiping the bench as well so I had methylated spirits on a cloth. The press’s residual heat ignited the spirits. It was one of those freak accidents.’
The flame quickly engulfed Ms Tesa’s right arm, spread across her chest and around her back, causing severe burns to 20 per cent of her body.
Maya Tesa (pictured with her four children) suffered horrific burns from a kitchen fire in January. She claims her subsequent ordeal in a top Australian hospital almost killed her
‘I patted my chest and realised it was a blue flame – a chemical burn. I couldn’t pat it out,’ Ms Tesa says.
‘I saw my children through the flame but I couldn’t hear them because I was screaming so much.
‘I was never in actual pain; it was just instinct and adrenaline to survive.’
Ms Tesa says her children and husband, Robert, who was fortunately at home, saved her life by ripping off her burning clothes, rolling her on the floor and getting her into the shower.
‘I was in the shower watching my skin bubble and fall off me,’ Ms Tesa recalls.
Robert also suffered third-degree burns to his hands, leaving it to the kids to dial Triple Zero.
When the ambulance arrived, they gave Ms Tesa an injection of the powerful tranquilliser ketamine before rushing her to hospital.
What happened next was part fever dream, part nightmare.
‘I was knocked out. The next thing I remember I was in the hospital. Then they knocked me back out.’
Because of the heavy sedation, Ms Tesa says she can only recall glimpses of the next few days.
The chemical fire caused severe burns to 20 per cent of Ms Tesa’s body
‘The one thing I remember was being incredibly thirsty,’ she adds.
‘I couldn’t open my mouth, it was so dry. I was telling them I was really dehydrated and they just kept giving me small glasses of water.
‘They left me like that for about three days.’
Ms Tesa says Robert and her friend Krystle Mitchell pleaded with hospital staff to do more.
‘They said, “You need to give her an IV. She’s dehydrated, she can barely talk,”‘ Ms Tesa recalls.
An IV was finally put into Ms Tesa’s arm, but Ms Mitchell noticed it wasn’t dripping and asked why.
‘They said, “We didn’t turn it on,”‘ Ms Tesa claims. They got the IV just to shut me up and say “she is fine”.
‘It was in the hours after that I apparently had a mini heart attack.’
Ms Tesa does not remember any specific pain or symptoms, but hospital staff detected enzymes in the blood that usually trigger a heart attack.
She was moved to the cardiac unit where she underwent a battery of tests.
During this time Ms Tesa’s body was rejecting the skin graft on her arm, meaning she required more surgery.
‘They didn’t give me any food and I was on minimal fluids to have this surgery,’ Ms Tesa says.
‘But the cardiac team wouldn’t speak to the burns team and the burns team wouldn’t do the graft until the cardiac team had signed off.
‘They left me 24 hours without food and minimal water in the cardiac unit for surgery that they never did that day – and made me do it again the following day.
‘I was nearly in tears, I was crying saying, “I am really hungry, I am really thirsty.”‘
She says on the second day she was moved to a waiting bay for the operating theatre, which she suspects was to hide her condition from her husband.
‘I was crying, “I just need some food,” and they were like, “No, you’ve just got surgery.” It got to 6pm and I needed to go the bathroom so they gave me a bedpan and it overspilled.
‘I was sitting in my own urine. Finally a nurse came and cleaned me up.
Ms Tesa spent five and a half weeks in hospital and received three skin grafts during that time. However, she says her standard of care was woeful (she is pictured in hospital)
‘No one was checking on me. They just left me in that waiting bay I was just watching people getting wheeled in and out of surgery. It was horrendous.’
At last, after hours of pleading, one of the ER nurses ran to a surgeon and asked, ‘Are you doing her today?’ and he replied that he would after dinner.
‘I don’t remember if he put me in [surgery] then or he went for dinner but they ended up doing the surgery [that day],’ Ms Tesa says.
‘But it was too late. The enzymes had increased and they were like, “She’s going to have a heart attack again.”
‘I said, “You have starved me, left me without fluids – this is why I am having these heart attacks because of you.”‘
Ms Tesa insists there was nothing wrong with her heart before going into hospital.
‘I’ve never had heart problems, we do not have history of heart problems in our family,’ she tells me.
‘They weren’t full-on heart attacks where you are jump-starting. They were telling me it is the enzymes in my blood that were triggering it.
‘There’s nothing wrong with me. I am vegan, I don’t eat saturated fats, I am healthy, I am constantly on the go.
‘I went into hospital healthy with a burns injury and it was the lack of fluids they gave me [at the] hospital that triggered this.’
Ms Tesa says when she came out of surgery she had received so many injections the staff were having trouble finding a vein to plug an IV into.
She claims that on one occasion, after an IV was inserted, the tubing was left on the floor and a nurse stepped on it, bending and pulling it out of her arm.
Ms Tesa still needs to have nine surgeries but has been forced to seek treatment interstate and overseas because of the long waiting list in Victoria
After that, she was given medication for pain relief but it was not enough.
‘It was 10pm and I didn’t know what to do,’ Ms Tesa says.
‘If I told my husband he would have come in and burned the place down. We’d had enough.
‘I went on [the hospital’s] website and found their internal complaints number.’
She called it and asked to have nurses sent who could sign off on stronger pain relief.
‘Two came up from the ICU who just pinpricked me with fentanyl about two or three times, just to get the pain to calm down,’ Ms Tesa adds.
However, her initiative came at a cost.
‘The nurses on the ward stopped speaking to me completely.
‘I had to wait two days to change the shift to get nurses who would speak to me because they were so angry with me for calling the complaints number.
‘I’d ask them, “What do you want me to do? I am living in pain and you don’t have the ability to sign off on medication.”‘
Ms Tesa said the plastic fruit cups that the hospital served normally came with flies inside them
Ms Tesa discovered many of the nurses were barely out of training.
She claims one nurse, who looked like a teenager, was about to put an IV into Ms Tesa’s arm unaware there was a bubble in the tubing.
‘I went, “There’s a bubble in the line. You are going to kill me,”‘ Ms Tesa says.
‘She laughed and said, “That’s why we have these safety contraptions; you can never kill people with these things.” That’s what she said to the trainee.
‘It was like I was in high school. What the hell is this? What is this nightmare?’
During her stay, Ms Tesa alleges she was overmedicated twice – ‘to the point where I was in a semi-coma’.
‘I woke up one day, I was groggy and tired,’ she says.
‘I don’t know what they have given me. I couldn’t even handle speaking to the kids on the phone; I just hung up on them. I couldn’t get myself out of the bathroom, I was so tired.
‘I could hear the nurses and doctors. I was semi-conscious but I couldn’t wake up.
‘They left me like that until 2pm or 3pm.’
When Robert came to visit, he said to the nurses, ‘This isn’t her. She’s usually awake. What have you done to her?’
An example of the meagre breakfast served up each day by the hospital during Ms Tesa’s stay
Suddenly alarmed, the staff started testing Ms Tesa for sepsis and gave her an ECG.
‘It wasn’t until the medication wore off and got out of my system that I woke back up,’ Ms Tesa says.
‘They then did that to me again and told me I was faking it, [that] I was making it up and it was not because of the medication they gave me.’
Ms Tesa claims the food served by the hospital was ‘horrendous’, with fruit cups sometimes handed out with flies buzzing inside them.
When she complained, a kitchen hand came to explain the situation.
‘They said, “It’s really hard to get rid of fruit flies in the kitchen, so what we are going to do from now on is put an expiry sticker over the hole in the lid where they getting in.”‘
Breakfast was a paltry piece of toast with a spread, cereal and juice. ‘The whole fruit they provided was either not ripe or old.’
For dinner, a sample menu was a small bowl of broth ‘which I would put my roast potato and vegetable in to bulk up’.
‘Sometimes they would add a small serving of rice and a fruit cup – with the regular appearance of a live fruit fly,’ Ms Tesa adds.
‘I don’t understand how anyone can recover on that diet.’
For dinner, a sample menu was a small bowl of broth ‘which I would put my roast potato and vegetable in to bulk up,’ says Ms Tesa
Two days after her third skin-graft operation, Ms Tesa was unceremoniously kicked out of the hospital.
She believes her stay demonstrates how public health services in Victoria have ‘completely broken down’ since the Covid pandemic.
‘The cleaners were telling me, “You don’t want to see what we see behind the scenes; it is completely disgusting,”‘ Ms Tesa says.
Still in constant agony, Ms Tesa claims she is ‘on a wait list to be wait-listed’ for the nine surgeries she still needs.
With four children to look after, two girls aged 14 and 12 and two boys aged 10 and five, she has no choice but soldier on.
‘For me, it’s just put your compression gear on, take the tablets and get up and get going,’ she adds.
‘If you want to cry, cry at night. That’s all I can do.’
She is also looking into having laser surgeries overseas or in Queensland.
Ms Tesa (centre) says she is still in agony but has no choice but to put on her compression clothes and get on with her day
Ms Tesa, who stood as a Liberal Democrat for the last Victorian state election and intends to run again as an independent, says the deplorable state of public health is not the fault of staff.
‘The hospitals will cover for the state government because they are already giving them so little,’ Ms Tesa says.
‘The good doctors are going interstate. The nurses are just so overworked, they are under so much pressure.
‘The Labor Party’s answer is to rush these kids out of universities and TAFE to fill the void left due to depleted numbers of experienced staff, thanks to vaccine mandates.
‘They are pushing these kids out of universities. The [junior doctors and nurses] are having a bad experience and either dropping out once they are on the floor or they are in there running amok.
‘I saw nurses in tears because they were being bullied by another shift of nurses.
‘They were just gossiping so much; it was like a high school.’
Ms Tesa says the experienced nurses ‘are overwhelmed by trainees they have to constantly monitor and do shifts that are back to back’.
‘They just need patients who say “yes”, tick all the boxes, and take the treatment they are giving out,’ she adds.
‘The problem is the treatment they are giving is actually going to kill people. It is going to make them sick. They don’t listen. The staff are just going, going, going.’
The hospital, which we have not named for legal reasons, said in a statement they could not talk about an individual patient.
‘Our specialist burns team works hard to provide the best care they can, and we are sorry for any concern or distress our patient may have felt during her time recovering in hospital,’ a spokesperson for the hospital said.
‘The lengthy recovery from burns can be both physically and emotionally challenging, and we acknowledge some areas of care fell short of making that journey as easy and comfortable as possible.
‘Severe burn is a traumatic event for anyone. It is a painful injury that often requires multiple procedures over an extended period.
‘We encourage our patient to contact us and speak with the hospital’s patient liaison team so we can review and address her concerns directly.’
