A Fife mum claims disgraced former Dundee surgeon Sam Eljamel operated on her without her consent in another shocking revelation about the doctor’s harmful conduct.
Ellen Carroll lives in constant agony and has almost no feeling in the left side of her body following three procedures at the rogue doctor’s hands to treat her back pain.
She says Eljamel even wanted to operate on her a fourth time – despite another doctor warning against any further surgery.
Horrifying journey through surgery
Ellen moved to Fife from England about 20 years ago and was working in a senior project management role for Texaco UK.
But in 2006 she started experiencing severe back pain.
Her employer provided her with Bupa health insurance so she was sent for a consultation with Eljamel at BMI Fernbrae Hospital in Dundee, which has since closed.
Eljamel harmed hundreds of patients while employed by NHS Tayside between 1995 and 2013 but also sometimes worked in the private sector. He has since moved to his native Libya where he avoids scrutiny for his actions.
Ellen had no suspicions about Eljamel’s behaviour at the time.
“He had such grace and put me at ease,” she told The Courier.
But a year later Ellen started to lose all sensation in her left foot.
She struggled on after a second surgery at Fernbrae, until the pain became “unbearable” in early 2009.
Ellen went back to see Eljamel but was starting to have doubts that he wasn’t telling her everything.
Despite her concerns, Ellen arranged to have a third operation.
“I felt I’d gone too far to back out,” she said.
“I was really scared.”
Eljamel arranged for Ellen to have a pre-med before the procedure in the hope of relaxing her.
It had the opposite effect.
‘I didn’t want the surgery’
Ellen told a nurse she was no longer comfortable going ahead with the operation and asked the hospital to call her husband.
Yet when Ellen awoke, she discovered Eljamel had gone ahead with the procedure anyway.
“I was very clear,” Ellen says.
“My husband never got the call. He was none the wiser.”
Ellen found the pain even more excruciating after her third surgery.
She had to take early retirement, downsizing from her home in Cupar to Anstruther.
Even though surgery clearly wasn’t working, Eljamel recommended a fourth procedure.
“Over my dead body was I going in again,” Ellen says.
Eljamel ‘went completely nuts’
She consulted a doctor in Cupar for a second opinion in 2013 who recommended she should not go under the knife again.
Ellen claims Eljamel then “went completely nuts”.
She says: “He asked why I was going for a second opinion. I said I’d had three lots of surgery and was worse than when I started.”
A letter shared with The Courier, from December 2014, shows the doctor believed “surgery was unlikely to be helpful and also carried some risk”.
The letter was written by Ellen’s GP, who agreed with the conclusion.
Ellen was constantly on painkillers in the years that followed and regularly broke bones due to the imbalance in her body.
She told us: “The left side was completely snookered.
“I’ve broken almost everything on that left side – my arm, my wrist, my leg. My mind will tell me my left leg is working, but it’s not.”
The painkillers and trauma had a serious impact on her life, leading to the collapse of her marriage and strained relations with family.
Ellen added: “I didn’t know night from day.
“I was sat in this house on my own, day after day, sometimes not bothering showering.
“I was such a different person.
“The mental side of it has affected me as much as the physical side.”
‘Capable of anything’
Yet despite all that, Ellen almost counts herself as fortunate.
“I’m quite glad I got out with my life,” she says.
“He was capable of doing anything.”
A spokesperson for The Circle Group, who now run BMI hospitals, said: “This surgeon’s practice is the subject of a public inquiry so it would be inappropriate for us to comment on specific historic cases.
“BMI Fernbrae Hospital was closed in 2019, prior to Circle Health Group’s acquisition of BMI Healthcare.
“We are committed to assisting the inquiry as far as we are able to.”
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