This is insane! They were away from home, and he had abdominal pain and a doctor recommended that he have a semi-urgent splenectomy - and they removed his LIVER instead!
How could that even happen, unless the man had a massively enlarged spleen which is a very real possibility? I’m not a physician, but those organs are not the same, to put it lightly (although the liver does take over the duties of the spleen if the latter is removed).
Apparently, he’d done something like this before.
That doctor’s got some spleenin’ to do.
Beverly Bryan was said to be reluctant for her husband to have the surgery in Florida and wanted to bring him back to Alabama, but they were told he could experience complications if they left the hospital.
I guess when this guy said he was doing the surgery…
I’ve heard of cases where a surgeon has removed the wrong kidney or amputated the wrong limb. And while those are bad, I can see how they might happen. The surgeon performed the operation to remove one of the organs in question and it probably isn’t usually apparent which organ is the unhealthy one.
But there’s no excuse when it’s a liver. The patient only has one of those and the surgeon should have known that that organ should not be removed. This isn’t just a terrible screw up. This is clear evidence that this surgeon is not qualified to practice medicine.
How? Just how? The spleen in the liver are on different sides of the body and look quite different. (Yes they can be flipped, but that’s about 1 person in 10,000 and they almost always know their condition.)
But was this doc totally alone in the O.R. ? Wasn’t there anyone else there to say, “uhhh, Tom? Hold up a second.” or something similar?
IANA medical professional of any variety, but if Wikipedia can be believed, aside from being on opposite sides of the body in nearly all cases, they’re different colors, sizes, and shapes. Surely a qualified surgeon would be able to tell them apart?
Nyvaak also raises a good point about how one would think other OR staff, who would have also had to study human anatomy to be qualified to be there, should have noticed something wrong.
The doctor apparently told the man’s wife his spleen was so diseased that it was swollen and had migrated to another part of his body.
My kidney removal I had big sharpie marks. The surgery was Right nephrectomy. You think they’d know right from left. The guy that marked me up the evening before said, you’d be surprised how stupid surgeons are.
Now, I don’t think that. Did not say that. And I lived.
So who the heck knows?
Maybe the surgeon in this case is on goofy juice. He had a previous problem, so the article says.
He needs a time out, for sure.
Well, they were in Florida and I guess a lot of people get swollen and migrate there, so maybe it seemed normal.
See this thread.
Sadly, incidents such as the one in this thread’s OP remind me of the old joke about the difference between God and a doctor.
Call me naive; I was assuming there were already procedures that went at least some way in that direction, simply because the medical field has owned up to the terrible frequency of such errors. And its cost.
I know that two equally qualified surgeons in the room would cost more than insurance companies want to pay, but I was genuinely under the impression that a “see something, say something” readiness to speak out was being encouraged.
“Culture of Safety” and “Crew Resource Management” are required topics in the refresher course paramedics take every two years. Are operating rooms giving only lip service to such advances?
…and apparently his liver had likewise migrated, such that it was nowhere near its OEM location (where the doc was cutting)? Migrated or not, you’d think that an important part of identifying an organ would be checking to see what else it’s attached to - especially if it’s so deformed that you can’t visually distinguish it from a liver.
I recently brought up medical CRM in another thread, and got this response:
I’m pictuing Dr. Lucy standing over the patient with her sad, crying face now. Thanks for that! 
But still, poor guy. This sucks for his family.
Truly a hard-to-understand error for us laymen.
I wonder how much of these kind of events are related to the trend to minimally invasive procedures?
IOW, and this is made-up guesswork for conversation / contrast …
Lot easier to get lost on the way to Grandma’s house in the second landscape than the first.
I know that I don’t know how real my surmise is. Anyone?
Everyone’s quick to jump to conclusions, but maybe there’s a perfectly “reasonable” explanation for the surgeon confusing a liver with a spleen and resecting the wrong organ. Perhaps he was stone cold drunk or so out of it on narcotics that he tripped, knocked his head, and gave himself a massive concussion before scrubbing in. I mean, have you ever tried to do a spleenectomy while you’re seeing double? Yeah, not exactly a walk in the park.
Speaking of surgical disasters, this reminds me of the case where a surgeon amputated the wrong leg, and the poor guy ended up losing the other one to gangrene. The case went to court, but the judge tossed it out. Why? The plaintiff didn’t have a leg to stand on.
Give a surgeon an inch, he’ll take a foot.
I don’t think anyone is removing a liver through a ⅛ inch hole. Not even through a few tiny holes.
Googling, the surgeon wasn’t an MD but instead a DO, a doctor of osteopathic medicine. Does that matter? (BTW, he’s not accepting new patients at this time.)
That can’t be right. You mean new patients aren’t accepting him at this time, right?
The doctor was planning on fava beans and a nice chianti for dinner anyways.