• 1 Post
  • 15 Comments
Joined 5 days ago
Cake day: May 9th, 2026
  • YawningNostalgia@thelemmy.clubtoNot The Onion@lemmy.world•Florida surgeon ‘devastated’ over death of patient after removing liver instead of spleenEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    The article is kinda shit and gives no information but usually there would be multiple eyes on the patient. You have at minimum the rotating nurse (not scrubbed in,) the scrub tech (sterile and knows every step of the operation,) the anesthesiologist or CRNA (wouldn’t have a good view of the site), and a resident or PA assisting. There would have been eyes on the patient, which is what makes it so confusing. Maybe the surgeon was intimidating and nobody felt they could speak up against him?

    https://www.namd.org/journal-of-medicine/3293-surgeon-removed-liver-instead-of-spleen-family-says.html This article is better than the one in the post but doesn’t answer the big question, which is how many people had eyes on the patient?!?!? It’s difficult for me to believe that a surgeon with experience could make this kind of mistake without inebriation being a factor. The article describes the organ removed as “grossly” obviously a liver, grossly in this case meaning you can see it with your eyes and don’t need special tools. I can’t imagine making this mistake and I’m not even a surgeon I just went to med school. Absolutely insane case and I wonder how many other people this doctor harmed.

  • YawningNostalgia@thelemmy.clubtoNot The Onion@lemmy.world•Florida surgeon ‘devastated’ over death of patient after removing liver instead of spleenEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    Totally agree and this has been discussed a lot. We learn about the Swiss cheese model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model, I’ve read The Checklist Manifesto, we talk a lot in med school about listening to nurses and scrub techs and pharmacists…it goes on.
    I’ve sat in on a lot of morbidity and mortality rounds. If there’s an adverse event it’s reviewed, and yes it can be very embarrassing for the people involved. We had a breast cancer patient who needed more exploration involving the axillary lymph nodes and an artery got nicked and vascular had to be called, and the next day she was bleeding significantly and had to be brought back to the OR with me, as the med student, holding pressure on her armpit. She lived. A few days later both attending surgeons (breast and vascular) had to do the Morbidity and Mortality in front of the whole hospital, and it felt like a movie.

    This should be investigated exactly how you said but there is no way that surgeon was sober. Unless the patient’s anatomy was crazy weird, there’s no way that was an honest mistake.

  • YawningNostalgia@thelemmy.clubOPtoMildly Infuriating@lemmy.world•Dunno where else to post a gripeEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    I told my friend about it and he reacted poorly because he thought I was being transphobic. I have absolutely no beef with people choosing what they want to be called.
    My issue was that they were making accessing necessary healthcare more difficult and virtue signaling via recorded message by saying they care about our pronouns.
    I would have thought my friend I’ve known for a year would know I was trying to make a more nuanced point about capitalism and enshittification and I wasn’t saying that trans people should be disregarded. Actually quite painful to see that he saw me complaining and heard trans and went straight to bigotry.