Marquita Baird keeps a boot box on the top shelf of a closet in her home in Shawnee, Oklahoma, outside Oklahoma City. Among its contents are 590 pages of doctor’s notes, court records and detailed nurse logs that tell the story of what happened after an OB-GYN named Thomas J. Byrne performed surgery on her more than 20 years ago.
“I held onto these records all this time,” Baird said. “I always knew somebody somewhere was going to get in touch with me someday because of what he did to me.”
Baird was 37 years old in 1999, when she went to see Byrne at a rural hospital called Seminole Medical Center after she’d been diagnosed with a condition called polycystic ovarian syndrome. Her ovaries were covered in cysts.
“The only answer they had was to do a hysterectomy,” Baird said.
Byrne removed her uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries, and conducted an operation to address a vaginal hernia. In his medical notes, which were reviewed by Gothamist, Byrne initially stated he was “concerned about injury to the bladder or ureters” but later wrote that there were no operative complications following the…
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