Hospital patient smells a rat

A patient refused to have knee surgery after doctors said there could be a dead rat in the operating theatre.

Andrew Cowper, 19, walked out after a consultant apologised for the stench of rotting rodent and assured him staff were trying to find the corpse.

The teenager, who had waited 11 months for the knee op, said: “He said the smell didn’t represent a health risk but I was appalled.



“I asked him, ‘If you were me would you have the operation?’ He looked at me and said ‘no’, so I decided there and then I wasn’t going to go ahead.”

The dead rat was found later in the roof of another part of the hospital, away from the operating theatres.

A spokesman for the Queen Elizabeth II hospital in Welwyn Garden City, Herts, said they would re-schedule Andrew’s surgery.