Posted by denised in
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Doctor mistakenly removes fat instead of appendix
The medical profession is not immune to really bad bosses. First there was the manager who pulled a nurse out of surgery to lay her off. Now comes word that a doctor in Minnesota had to perform an appendectomy twice on the same patient after removing “fatty tissue” instead of the appendix on the first go round. Two days later when the patient’s appendix had already erupted and when the pathologist’s report came back showing that what was removed “was not an appendix,” the patient’s real appendix was removed. We hope.
I’ve heard horror stories of doctors amputating the wrong limb, performing surgery on the wrong body part and operating on the wrong patient all together. Aren’t there checks and balances for these things? Of course the hospital is saying it did nothing wrong. Maybe it has established protocols that the doctor and surgical staff didn’t follow. Even then, if staff isn’t following established protocol, that is your problem. In this case, the patient survived, but ended up spending 11 days in the hospital after complications following the second surgery. I hope the doctor found a check in there when he went in the second time because he’s going to need it to handle the law suit that’s most certainly coming his way.
