[bloodrayne]

In February 2005, a full year after Frye's initial complaint, the Board of Healing Arts took action against Rajanna. Citing numerous problems with the cleanliness of his clinic, the board fined him $1,000 and made him promise to clean the place up, get certified in advanced cardiac life support and submit to two unannounced follow-up inspections.

It wasn't the first time the board had disciplined him. In 2000, Rajanna was fined $1,000 for improperly dispensing prescription medications. A year later, he was fined another $1,000 for failing to provide Rh factor testing to patients.

On March 22 and 24 of this year, Board of Healing Arts investigator Peter Massey conducted surprise inspections of Rajanna's clinic and found that conditions had actually worsened. On the second visit, he snapped a photo of a dead mouse on the clinic floor.

"The evidence over these past few years has just been so compelling that anyone in their right mind can't avoid it," Mast tells the Pitch. "This kind of thing would never be accepted in any other medical clinic or even in a restaurant without being closed down."

The Rajanna photos, along with the January 2003 death of a 19-year-old Texas woman after an abortion at Tiller's Wichita clinic, gave the bill's proponents ammunition.

State Sen. Roger Reitz, a medical doctor who voted against previous versions of the bill, says the photos of Rajanna's clinic changed his mind on the clinic-licensing issue. Reitz remembers the moment a colleague tapped him on the shoulder during a break and slid the color photos toward him. "I was aghast. I had thought better of my colleagues," Reitz says. "It was simply unacceptable."

Massey testified that on his first surprised visit, he looked around and saw a number of problems: The floors needed vacuuming, there were soiled surgical drapes in the office that had been folded and stacked instead of thrown away, the toilet was dirty and streaked, two plastic bags full of trash sat on the office floor, old paper towels sat in the soap dishes, and there were large gaps along the baseboards in the procedure room left by the removal of carpet. In the recovery room, there was an old living-room couch with a standard bed pillow and blanket on it. The lids were off the biohazard containers, leaving bloody waste exposed. In the refrigerator, predrawn syringes of medication were unlabeled, with only a handwritten initial of the drug on the cup containing the syringes.

Two days later, Massey arrived on a Thursday morning and found the dead rodent. When Rajanna arrived and Massey told him about the mouse, Massey testified, "He somewhat exclaimed that it was working, that his rodent pest control was working." Rajanna explained that he had put out rat poison in the clinic. When Massey asked Rajanna why the clinic was so dirty, "He told me that he had explained to 'his girls' that this needed to be cleaned, but they had failed to clean," Massey testified.

At the hearing, Rajanna called two clinic employees to testify. Employee Lori Jakes admitted that she had been hired to clean the office but had quickly been called on to assist during abortions. The staff had so many duties, Jakes said, that they sometimes didn't have time to check on patients in the recovery room.

Rajanna has moved out of the building on Central Avenue and does not plan to go back. He hired an attorney in May, and he can appeal his license revocation to the district court. He says he is a good surgeon and has had a very low rate of complications. "If there's any way we can make them understand the truth, it's what I want to do," Rajanna says.

Rajanna says he was offering a service to the community by providing abortions at a lower price than other area clinics. "We were helping the women in the community. The hugs that I get is enough reward," he says.