A nurse discovered lung cancer patient George McGarry, 72, had set himself on fire because, while he was smoking in his hospital bed, he set fire to the oxygen being piped through tubes in his nose. He died of a heart attack four days later as a result of his injuries. As I read this story, I thought the name of the hospital sounded familiar. It is. I remember it from the post I did recently about John Heron, diagnosed with kidney cancer, who went in for surgery to have his diseased kidney removed, only the surgeon removed the healthy kidney by mistake.

I am certain there are hundreds of hospital horror stories that could be told, and perhaps Ayr Hospital has made the news only because of the bizarre and unbelievable circumstances of late where patients are harmed in the most inefficient ways, but really -- there are some stories that leave you with such a sense of stunned disbelief you are left wondering if the world tilted just a bit more while you were sleeping, rotating ever closer into a dimension of precarious insanity. And what was a lung cancer patient doing smoking in his hospital bed? Yes, I know, it's the bad stuff that makes the news, but these stories are unusually disturbing, don't you think?