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Florida surgeon ‘devastated’ over death of patient after removing liver instead of spleen
(www.theguardian.com)
Thomas Shaknovsky botched the surgery of William Bryan, 70, who died on the operating table
According to Shaknovksy’s deposition, after removing Bryan’s liver, the surgeon instructed a nurse to label the organ as a “spleen” – and he also identified it as a spleen in Bryan’s postoperative notes. Shaknovsky later said he had been “mentally compromised” at the time of Bryan’s death, explaining that he was “devastated, demoralized, crying over his passing, felt that I failed him”.
Ok that’s insane, was he drunk or something? But mainly I wanna know what the surg techs and nurses were thinking. Like, wouldn’t you see he was working on the wrong side of the abdomen? Investigate everyone in that operating room IMO
According to the article the patient was actively bleeding to death at the time, so he (and everyone else) was frantically trying to save his life:
There was a post about this case a month or two ago on Lemmy. I can’t find the link right now, I’m sorry. But in there, someone had posted a link to the case files for the court. You could see summaries of testimony from multiple nurses and scrub techs. The short version was that many of them had strong reservations about the surgeon prior to this case due to other errors. When this case happened, they were all pretty certain it was not the spleen immediately.
Did nobody try to stop him?
do that and you lose your job. Surgeons are infamous vindictive cunts.
I would be willing to lose my job it it meant saving someones life
My dude, I run into people who wanted to have that "I'm willing to lose my job over this" fight in the hospital a few times over something that would kill me. And they were on the killing me side. And I know they were willing to take it to losing their job because they did.
I’m not sure if you mean this generally before the case happened, or if you meant, did nobody try to stop him during the case?
I think before the case, there were a lot of people who were uneasy with him because of the types of mistakes he was making, although these were generally smaller, less serious mistakes. I think there had been some scrutiny of his practice, but I don’t recall the details.
During the case, it sounded like there was a complication with bleeding which partially obscured visibility in the operative field. The people in the room knew that the case was not going well because of the bleeding, but it wasn’t until he actually pulled the liver out of the patient that anyone realized how wrong things had gone.
Surgeon removes wrong leg.
Surgeon removes healthy legs.
Different surgeon removes wrong leg.
in every case, there was a team of people in the surgery.
That poor person. 😢
Yes there’s always a team in the room. I was only stating that in this case it seemed like from the court summary, the other team members knew there was a problem with bleeding but were unaware he was resecting the liver until he pulled it out of the patient. It sounded like because of the excessive blood they simply couldn’t see well.
"Not my job"
It could be dementia.