Another (rare) ‘hospital mix-up’ – when the wrong body is released to a family for burial – happened this week in Lisbon, but it differs from the norm by involving ‘media celebrities’.
The brother-in-law of flamboyant CMTV show host Manuel Luís Goucha died (of cancer) at Lisbon’s São José Hospital on Wednesday.
His funeral yesterday was getting started when the coffin was ‘opened’ (as can be practice in Portuguese funerals) to reveal ‘the wrong body’.
The widow of the deceased (whose whereabouts at this point was a mystery: was he being buried in a funeral somewhere else across the capital?) has told Correio da Manhã: “It is inadmissible. We found another man in the coffin – dressed in the clothes we had delivered for my husband!”
Manuela Lupi Costa (widow of the deceased, Mário Oliveira Nunes) described herself as “in shock”.
The funeral parlour was quizzed – and pointed the finger squarely at S. José Hospital for incorrectly sending over a body.
In this case, however, the ‘right body’ was rapidly located – and fortunately it had not been dispatched for burial/ cremation elsewhere during the confusion.
Adding further chill to the whole occasion, the widow explains she was told the mix-up was almost certainly due to the ‘elevated number of deaths’ at S. José Hospital recently, which has required the doubling-up of bodies in refrigerated containers.
None of this will have mollified Manuela Lupi Costa, who told CM that “the body delivered to us had the name Carlos Oliveira on his wrist. He in no way resembled my husband. It is incomprehensible, a crass error that the hospital should not have committed.”
As always happens in these (rare) mix-ups, a spokesperson for the hospital has ‘lamented’ the whole episode. An inquiry into how it could have happened has been opened.
The fact that two bodies sharing the name ‘Oliveira’ were seemingly put in the same refrigerated container awaiting dispatch for burial/ cremation might be a clue as to the root of this drama. But we are unlikely to hear much more, unless the family of Carlos Oliveira has something to say about it.
Adding a final twist to this story is the fact that Manuel Luís Goucha’s spouse is Rui Oliveira, the brother of the deceased – and another figure regularly featured in celebrity magazines alongside his famous husband.
Source: Correio da Manhã
