Warning: Graphic details follow.It couldn’t have happened.Such was the disbelief of family, friends, doctors and hospital administrators as female patients confided they’d been sexually assaulted while semi-conscious, on the operating table, by anesthesiologist Dr. George Doodnaught.Some of the victims even doubted themselves, so persistently were they told that the very idea was preposterous, that they’d likely hallucinated the events, dreamt it under sedation.But they were telling the truth.In 2013, Doodnaught — who practised at North York General Hospital for more than a quarter-century — was convicted on 21 counts of sexual assault and sentenced to 10 years.Twenty-one victims, aged 25 to 75. Except there were actually more but their complaints weren’t included in the prosecution’s case for various reasons.Such as the woman who was basically cast aside on the allegation — adamantly denied — that she’d subsequently made a phone call to the doctor.Patient P, she was, in the statement of “uncontested facts and plea of no contest” presented Tuesday to a disciplinary panel of the College of Physicians and Surgeons on Ontario.“Thank you for allowing me to finally have a voice,” Patient P said in her victim impact statement, read aloud.The middle-aged woman, a wife and mother, had undergone surgery for bilateral knee replacement. But even under the fog of anesthetic, she realized that Doodnaught (who apparently couldn’t be seen by doctors and nurses in the operating room, seated at the head of the patient, behind a screen) had rubbed her breast, while she murmured “no, no”; then placed his penis in her palm, using that hand to masturbate himself.“I still have nightmares about that day. I just don’t have them nightly anymore. It’s been eight and a half years. I thought the anxiety would go away. But it stays with me forever.”Eleven further wom ...
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