‘This is pure murder’: Young wife reportedly embalmed alive suffered excruciating pain

A woman died after she was reportedly embalmed alive in Russia, and now a criminal probe has been launched to look into the case.

The DailyMail reports that 27-year-old Ekaterina Fedyaeva was hospitalized for what was supposed to be routine surgery in Ulyanovsk, Russia. Her mother alleges that instead of putting her on a saline drip, medical staff used formalin, a solution that contains formaldehyde.

Formaldehyde is typically injected into the veins of the deceased to stop decomposition from occurring. Fedyaeva was suffering from excruciating convulsions and pain for multiple days before she fell into a comatose state.

The woman was then placed on life support and her heart stopped beating in several instances, according to the newspaper. She was later flown to a Moscow hospital where she awoke from the coma but later died after multiple organs failed.

The woman’s husband, Igor, and her mother, Galina Baryshnikova, were at the hospital when she initially came out of surgery.

“Her legs were moving, she had convulsions, her whole body was shaking,” Baryshnikova said. “I put socks on her, then a robe, then a blanket but she was shivering to such an extent, I can’t even describe it.

“No doctor came to see her although she was coming round from anesthetic,” she added.

Fedyaeva was experiencing persistent stomach pain and vomiting. Baryshnikova said she didn’t know at the time that formalin was slowing killing her daughter.

“And they knew very well that they washed up her body with a poison – and they did nothing to help,” she said.

“Now I understand that formalin was simply eroding her body from inside. People who performed the surgery already knew that they infused something wrong. They needed to take some urgent measures – but they did nothing.”

Baryshnikova pleaded for help, but the doctors just told her to stop worrying, go home and cook soup. Fedyaeva was then rushed to the hospital’s intensive care unit overnight as she became increasingly ill.

“For 14 hours after surgery she was living with this formalin and they did nothing,” Baryshnikova said.

Baryshnikova recalled a moment when she began searching for medical staff and discovered they were huddled together “discussing how to tell us that a terrible mistake had been made.”

Except they didn’t admit to precisely what occurred.

The chief doctor told her that her that a medical mistake had occurred and that her daughter’s lungs, heart and liver had stopped working. It was only after Fedyaeva was moved to the hospital in Moscow that the full truth came out, when the doctor there disclosed the mistake. Hospital staff had used 52 drugs on Fedyaeva, desperately trying to save her.

“It is such a crime,” Baryshnikova said. “I spoke to the criminal investigator, and he told me it was negligence. But this is pure murder.”

Fedyaeva was laid to rest on Saturday. Criminal investigators are examining her death.

[Feature Photo: Wiki Commons/P.J.L Laurens]