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Going into a medical facility for any procedure can cause stress and anxiety. You wonder if you are going to feel better after the procedure. You wonder if the doctor will find that you have a condition much worse than what you went in for. Probably the one thing you don’t think about is what happens if your doctor makes a mistake while performing the procedure on you. Here are some examples of medical procedures gone terribly wrong.
A teaching hospital performed a cerebral angiography on a 67 year old woman. She was returned to a different room than she occupied originally before the surgery. The very next day this same woman was taken back to the operating room for open heart surgery. Her doctor called the OR in a panic, wondering why his patient was back in surgery. Realizing the error in operating on the wrong patient, the surgery was halted and the patient returned to her room where she recovered. The additional unnecessary surgery left her more susceptible to stroke and heart attacks.
Three times in one year, surgeons at a Rhode Island hospital performed brain surgery on the wrong side of their patient’s brains. One patient had a hole drilled into the wrong side of her skull. The mistake was caught early on in the surgery and corrected. The patient survived. One of the other patients was not so lucky. An 86 year old man died from his surgery.
A North Carolina hospital was found responsible for the death of a girl who was admitted for a heart and lung transplant. The doctors at this facility failed to ensure a compatible blood type for a transfusion. The resulting complications caused the 17 year old girl’s death two weeks later.
Not all medical malpractice lawsuits are the result of a death. A fertility clinic was sued for using the wrong sperm to impregnate a female. Instead of using her husband’s sperm, a stranger’s sperm was mistakenly used. This became obvious when the couple’s baby was born with significantly darker skin. The donor was found to have African descent.
Probably the most disturbing medical mistake that can happen deals with anesthesia. A 72 year old male actually went into surgery and was awake for the entire procedure. Anesthesiologists failed to notice. He felt all the pain, pressure and discomfort during the surgery.
Those involved in these medical horror stories surely had successful medical malpractice lawsuits.