"No one is above mistake" is one phrase a lot of people throw around at every chance, "Everyone makes mistake" is yet another one that is popular but while you can forgive a chef that over salted your food, or overlook a wrong pizza order, you cannot and will find it very difficult if not near impossible to forgive a doctor that made a mistake with your health thereby taking your life with less seriousness. Let's take a look at some mistakes made by medical practitioners that got me speechless and could possibly do the same to you.
Far back in 1985, a photographer was to undergo a surgery to remove his cancerous eye which was to be used for the purpose of research. The surgery lasted for 8 hours and it was time to inject his cerebrospinal fluid into his spine but the doctor mistakenly injected glutaraldehyde into the spine along with the patient's CSF. This error happened because an Opthalmology resident brought in the glutaraldehyde (formaldehyde like) without a labeling after which a communication mix-up led to a nurse labeling the fluid as CSF which was removed from the patient and was to back into the patient's spine.
The patient's blood pressure immediately dropped and his pulse slowed down. The medical team didn't know what caused it and tried to save the patient was couldn't. They later found out what they had injected after the resident came back to request for the vial and formaldehyde. The patient was declared brain dead and went into a coma immediately.
It was 2009, and a German man went to a hospital for a prostrate cancer surgery and the surgery went well but then he began to experience intense pain, fatigue, fever and wounds not healing. When he went to the hospital, the medical team disregarded it as a post-op norm. The pain continued for weeks and months but he was back to the hospital after months when a nurse that would come treat him saw a gauze pad sticking out of the wound.
Another operation was carried out on the man, In fact two operations were carried out on the man and they were able to remove 16 surgical items from him. These items included a needle, a six-inch long compress, a six-inch roll of bandage, a fragment of surgical mask , and several swabs. The man actually survived and the man sued the clinic for £80,000 in damages.
Actually, forgetting surgical item should never happen in surgeries but then there have been cases of one or two items left in a patient's body but 16 is a whole lot. To be certain surgical items are complete, they are usually checked and accounted for before and after a surgical procedure.
Another medical error was one from a nurse where in injected soup into a patients body via an IV fluid. Iida vitor maciel, an 88 year old woman suffered stroke which left her partially paralyzed and so she was fed using a feeding tube. The nurse who was supposed to feed her through the feeding tube mistakenly put it through her IV in her right hand. The patient immediately began to react to it and passed away after this. Autopsy showed pulmonary embolism which was associated to the soup in her vein causing the veins in her lungs to clot.
Another negligent situation was one that happened in Austria where a doctor successfully amputated a patient's right leg but while the operation was a success, it was the patient's left leg that was to be amputated and not the right one. This was because the surgeon had marked the wrong leg for amputation before the procedure began.
When it comes to a lot of profession, excuses can be given for mistakes but this doesn't usually work when it comes to medical practitioners because they are dealing with human lives and any mistake can be very costly that its payment could be the life of a patient.
Read More
- https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2262797/Surgeon-left-16-items
- https://www.panish.law/2013/01/16-items-found-in-german-man-following-surgical-procedure/
- https://www.huffpost.com/entry/surgeons-allegedly-left-16-items
- https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ilda-vitor-maciel-dies-soup-injection_n_1967495
- https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/a/julian-kimble
- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/an-austrian-doctor-who-amputated
- https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-03-06-mn-26274-story.html
- https://www.nytimes.com/1985/03/10/us/one-death-many-questions-in-miami.html
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I cannot even begin to imagine some of these errors, I mean, they are extremely terrible.
There is a prayer I make every day, may we never be victims of human errors and this is a good example of such.