A woman who claimed to be a doctor ordered an excessive amount of anaesthetic to be used during a breast filler procedure on a Sydney beauty clinic manager, who had a heart attack and was declared brain-dead after the situation went “to hell in a handbasket”, a jury has been told.
Jie Shao, 40, is on trial in Sydney’s Downing Centre District Court over the death of Jean Huang, 35, on September 1, 2017, two days after the procedure at The Medi Beauty clinic which Huang operated and part-owned in Chippendale.
On Thursday, Shao pleaded not guilty to manslaughter but guilty to the alternative charge of recklessly administering poison endangering life, being the local anaesthetic lidocaine.
In her opening address to the jury, Crown prosecutor Sara Gul said Shao, a Chinese national, “held herself out as a doctor” and had a medical degree from Guangdong University. But she was not registered as a doctor in China or Australia, and had failed a master’s degree in the United Kingdom.
Shao arrived in the country four days before the incident.
She was scheduled to perform a “boob job” involving injecting hyaluronic acid filler to increase Huang’s cup size, Gul said. However, the injectable breast augmentation was not legal in Australia.
Huang had been worried about how painful the procedure would be and spoke to Shao about using anaesthetic “to dull the pain”, the prosecutor said.
“She had no authority to conduct the breast augmentation procedure on Ms Huang and shouldn’t have conducted any part of it,” the prosecutor said to the jury.
Gul said Huang, who was five-foot-three and weighted 52 kilograms, was given the painkiller tramadol via an intravenous drip and the local anaesthetic lidocaine ahead of the filler. The tramadol was from Portugal and the filler from Korea, and neither were approved for use in Australia.
The Crown alleges unregistered nurse Yueqiong Fu drew up the drugs on instruction of Shao, whom she believed was a doctor.
“In that room, things went very, very badly,” Gul said. “The Crown says the accused administered a dose of lidocaine well in excess of the recommended maximum dose. She ordered too much to be mixed up, and she gave Ms Huang too much.”
The court heard Huang started slurring her words, twitching, convulsing and foaming at the mouth, lost consciousness and had a cardiac arrest. She was put on life support in hospital but declared brain-dead from a lidocaine overdose and died.
The jury was told Fu, who pleaded guilty to administering a poison and received a community sentence including a discount for testimony at Shao’s trial, is expected to say she “basically did what she was told”.
Gul said Huang went into the room and came out on an ambulance stretcher after “things have gone to hell in a handbasket”.
“She ended up dead,” the prosecutor said.
The court heard the clinic did not have oxygen or a defibrillator.
Gul said Shao did not get a medical history from Huang or undertake consent procedures, and alleged that her actions were “so seriously negligent” they amounted to a criminal offence.
The Crown will call witnesses including Huang’s husband and mother, people linked to the Carlton Street beauty clinic near Chinatown, paramedics, police and various medical professionals.
Opening the defence case, barrister Winston Terracini, SC, said it was agreed Shao was there and took part in a procedure, and “this tragedy resulted in this young woman’s death”.
“It’s not manslaughter, it’s a terrible mistake. Mistakes, plural,” he said.
Terracini said his client told police: “I said what the mixture should be, and I was provided with it.”
He said his client did not have responsibility over emergency procedures or equipment, and a male doctor who had been in the clinic that afternoon “went straight to the airport” and “won’t come back from Taiwan”.
The trial is expected to run for up to three weeks before Judge Timothy Gartelmann.
