A Florida surgeon mistakenly removed a man’s liver instead of his spleen, causing him to die on the operating table, a lawyer for the man’s widow alleges.
William Bryan, 70, of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, underwent surgery on Aug. 21, at Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast hospital in Miramar, Florida, because of spleen abnormalities, according to a statement from the personal injury firm Zarzaur Law, based in Pensacola, Florida.
How?
Oh, of course. I’m sure organs do that sort of thing all the time.
“This spleen is so diseased it’s in the exact same place as and looks just like a liver”
I mean, there is an extremely rare condition where basically all of your internal organs are mirrored or flipped from their normal orientation… (situs inversus, roughly 1 in 10,000 people are estimated to have it)
But…
If that were the case here, it’d be immediately obvious to any one with basic anatomical knowledge.
Hope this dumbass goes to jail.
My appendix was apparently on the other side. It took them forever to diagnose and I lived with chronic appendicitis as a result for over a year. That was fun. It took my ass going septic and going to the ER for them to even bother to run a CT and find the source of the problem. Even when I said are you sure this isn’t appendicitis? No raiderkev, your appendix is on the other side. This is just indigestion. Fuck you urgent care.
I assume that in this case, they did the imaging before starting the surgery. Even if the spleen really was on the wrong side, they should have known in advance.
If I was a surgeon I could see myself making that mistake