Below, you will see the list of really shocking medical mistakes that has lead to tragic consequences.
Received the wrong heart and lungs, then died
17-year-old Jésica Santillán died 2 weeks after receiving the heart and lungs of a patient whose blood type did not match hers. Doctors at the Duke University Medical Center didn’t check the compatibility before starting the surgery. After a rare second transplant operation to attempt to rectify the error, she suffered brain damage and complications that subsequently hastened her death.
The hospital blamed human error for the death, along with a lack of safeguards to ensure a compatible transplant. According to reports, Duke reached an agreement on an undisclosed settlement with the family. Thus, neither the hospital nor the family is allowed to comment on the case.
A 13-Inch souvenir
Donald Church, aged 49, had the tumor in his abdomen removed. However, the doctors left the 13-inch-long retractor in Church’s abdomen by mistake. Fortunately, surgeons managed to remove the retractor shortly after it was discovered. The patient later experienced no long-term health consequences from the mistake. The hospital agreed to pay Church $97,000.
An open heart invasive procedure… on the wrong patient
Joan Morris (not a real name), 67, was admitted to a teaching hospital for cerebral angiography. The day after that procedure, she mistakenly underwent an invasive cardiac electrophysiology study. After angiography, the patient was transferred to another floor rather than returning to her original bed. Discharge was planned for the following day. The next morning, however, the patient was taken for an open heart procedure. The patient had been on the operating table for an hour. Doctors had made an incision in her groin, punctured an artery, threaded in a tube and snaked it up into her heart (a procedure with risks of bleeding, infection, heart attack and stroke). During the surgery, the doctor from another department called inquiring “what are you doing with my patient?” The operating surgeons realized there was nothing wrong with her heart, as they checked the chart. The patient was quickly returned to her ward in a stable condition.
The Surgeon who removed the wrong leg
In what was, perhaps, the most publicized case of a surgical mistake in its time, a Tampa (Florida) surgeon mistakenly removed the wrong leg of his patient, 52-year-old Willie King, during an amputation procedure in February 1995. It was later revealed that a chain of errors before the surgery culminated in the wrong leg being prepped for the procedure. While the surgeon’s team realized in the middle of the procedure that they were operating on the wrong leg, it was already too late, and the leg was removed. The doctor’s license was suspended for 6 months, and he was fined $10,000. University Community Hospital in Tampa, the medical center where the surgery took place, paid $900,000 to King and the surgeon involved in the case paid an additional $250,000 to King.
Patient awake during surgery later committed suicide
A West Virginia man’s family claims inadequate anaesthetic during surgery allowed him to feel every slice of the surgeon’s scalpel – a trauma they believe led him to take his own life two weeks later. Sherman Sizemore during the operation reportedly experienced a phenomenon known as anaesthetic awareness – a state in which a surgical patient is able to feel pain, pressure or discomfort during an operation, but is unable to move or communicate with doctors. According to the complaint, anaesthesiologists administered the drugs to numb the patient, but they failed to give him the general anaesthetic that would render him unconscious until 16 minutes after surgeons first cut into his abdomen. Family members say the 73-year-old Baptist minister was driven to kill himself by the traumatic experience of being awake during surgery but unable to move or cry out in pain.
Unbelievable right? Everyone has to be careful.
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