Wednesday, March 10, 2010

TOILET OF MASS DESTRUCTION

TODAY IN DISGUSTING LAWSUITS, STARRING OVERFLOWING TOILETS, TOENAILS AND AN AMPUTATED LEG
By Richard Connelly

Houston Press
March 8, 2010

Here's a lesson for all you DIY guys, or maybe all the spouses whose significant other wants them to get off their ass and become a DIY person: Fix a toilet and you can lose your leg. In a most disgusting manner.

That, at least, is the claim made by Houstonian Oscar Batres, who is suing his apartment complex because, he says, they would not fix his clogged toilet.

So he took matters into his own hands, and there, according to his suit via Courthouse News Service, is where things begin to go awry.

"As plaintiff was in the process of unclogging the toilet, the water in the toilet commenced to overflow," Batres says in his complaint in Harris County Court.

He shut off the water supply but the toilet continued to overflow, filled his bathroom and soaked the carpet in the master bedroom, Batres says.

"Finally after about 10 minutes, the toilet stopped overflowing," Batres says.

In case you don't get the picture, the suit notes that "The liquid coming out of the toilet was brown and clearly contained feces."

Which was bad enough, but then came nail-clipping time.

Three days after his toilet overflowed, Batres cut himself while trimming his toenails in the bathroom.

He used over-the-counter ointment on it but his toe and part of his foot turned red, he developed a fever and flulike symptoms, and went to emergency room, he says. Tests showed that he had gangrene and on Dec. 15, 2009 his right leg was amputated below the knee. It was a little over 2 weeks since his toilet overflowed.

"The specimen taken at the hospital revealed the plaintiff's infection and eventual leg amputation was caused due to an infection caused by bacteria commonly found in feces," Batres says.

The suit -- which asks for unspecified damages -- says that the apartment complex cleaned the rug two weeks after the amputation.

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