Today's video is going to feature three of the worst medical procedures and incidents that have ever occurred.
Before you continue, I want to warn you that these stories are very sad and very disturbing.
Viewer discretion is advised.
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In the year 2000, Donald Church went to the doctor and got a terrible diagnosis.
He had been sick and in pain for the past little while, and after a series of tests,
doctors found that he had a large malignant tumor in his abdomen.
Thankfully, although the tumor was cancerous, it was at a stage where it was operable.
So despite it still being a scary diagnosis, the chances were good for treatment.
Donald was scheduled to have surgery to have the tumor removed,
and then in June of the year 2000, he arrived at the University of Washington Medical Center.
At the hospital, he was placed under anesthesia,
and then the doctors started working on cutting out the large tumor.
Because of how large it was and its location, they also had to remove his appendix
and part of his large intestine along with the tumor.
The surgery was ultimately a success and the tumor was removed.
But then after Donald woke up, he was in an immense amount of pain.
Initially, he figured this was normal since it was a major surgery,
and he would have to spend the next week in the hospital anyway to be monitored and recover,
so he had plenty of time to just rest and not move much.
But by the end of the week, the pain hadn't subsided at all.
It was excruciating to walk and bend over and even go to the bathroom.
His surgeons reassured him once again that this was a major surgery -
significant pain even after a week isn't uncommon.
Then, a week after surgery, he was discharged from the hospital and went home,
but the pain was even worse now that he was moving around.
Any movement at all was almost unbearably painful.
He couldn't have bowel movements for days at a time, and he sometimes felt a weird bulging in his abdomen,
like the swelling was getting worse.
And the pain seemed to move around.
Sometimes, he felt it in his stomach, and other times, it was closer to his chest.
The pain got to be so bad that there were times that he would just lay down on the bathroom floor, sobbing.
Eventually, he started to think that he was literally dying. The pain was so bad.
A couple of weeks following the surgery, he was okay to return to work
where he worked in building maintenance.
But when he returned to work, he was almost completely unable to work
and especially unable to do anything heavy.
At his 30-day post-op checkup, he told the surgeon about how much pain he was in,
but for some reason, they didn't quite understand the severity.
They reassured him once again that this was totally normal because of how extensive the surgery was.
But this wasn't normal - the surgeons had made a huge mistake.
Another couple of weeks went by and Donald was still in excruciating pain almost every moment of the day.
Finally, three weeks following the post-op checkup, his wife and mother convinced him
that he needed to get a second opinion
so he called up his family doctor and scheduled an appointment.
When he went into the doctor's office, the doctor did actually feel around the area
and noticed a concerning lump in Donald's abdomen.
The doctor then sent him for x-rays and lo and behold,
the x-ray revealed that Donald had a 13-inch-long (33 cm) metal retractor
inside of his abdomen that was left there during the surgery.
The pain that he felt was the instrument shifting back and forth in his abdomen -
sometimes causing pain in his stomach and sometimes in his chest.
The bulging that he felt was the instrument literally pushing up against his skin from the inside.
Now, you might be wondering how something so large could have ever gotten lost in the first place,
or why there was no procedure to check for something like that.
Well, apparently, there is a procedure to count and check all of the smaller instruments
to prevent something like this from happening.
But there was nothing in place for larger instruments,
simply because no one ever thought that something over a foot-long could possibly get lost during a surgery.
As the surgeons were doing the surgery,
the retractor was placed in such a way that at some point, it slipped inside of his abdomen and then out of view.
After they removed everything they needed to remove,
Donald was stitched back up with the 13-inch-long retractor still inside of his body.
Following this discovery, Donald was in shock.
He actually wasn't angry; he was relieved. He had sincerely believed that he was dying,
so finding the root cause for all of his pain substantiated everything he had been feeling
for the last two months.
A few days following the x-ray, he returned to the hospital
and finally had the 13-inch retractor removed from his body.
The hospital and operating team would take full responsibility for the mistake,
and Donald was awarded $97,000 in damages for his suffering.
Following the mistake as well, new policies were enacted to count all of the instruments,
including the larger ones, to ensure nothing like this would ever happen again.
And although this was a horrifying experience for Donald,
this policy has slowly been adopted nationwide to reduce the likelihood of it happening to anyone else.
Up until 2011, Japan received both 30% of all of its electricity from nuclear power.
In 2011, an earthquake and subsequent tsunami rocked the coastal region of Fukushima.
These two in combination damaged a nuclear power plant in the area,
which ultimately led to the second-worst nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.
Following this event, Japan's dependence on nuclear energy declined significantly.
And although Fukushima was the worst nuclear disaster in Japanese history,
there were two others in the late '90s that resulted in one of the worst medical incidents in recorded history.
The first was a relatively minor accident in 1997 at the Tōkai Nuclear Plant.
The waste product from these power plants is encased in asphalt for storage.
And on March 11th, the plant was trialing a new mixture of asphalt.
The new mixture caused a chemical reaction with the waste product
that then caught fire and quickly spread throughout the plant.
Workers on site were unable to put out the fire and then were forced out by the fire and radiation alarms.
The gases inside the building eventually built up to the point that the windows exploded,
causing smoke and radiation to escape into the surrounding area.
Ultimately, 37 of the workers were exposed to trace amounts of radiation
and some trace amounts were also detected in the surrounding area.
Then, in 1999, about four miles (6.4 km) away from the Tōkai Nuclear Plant at a fuel enrichment plant,
there was a second and more severe accident.
On September 30th, three technicians were quickly going through some of the fuel conversion steps
to meet an upcoming shipping deadline.
This was the first batch of fuel that the plant had needed in three years,
and there had been no additional training done or qualifications required by the plant
for its technicians to complete the process.
In addition, to save time, the technicians were mixing the chemicals manually in stainless-steel buckets.
They were following guidelines laid out by the plant,
but weren't aware that this manual procedure had not been approved by the Nuclear Safety Board.
If they had been following proper procedure, the chemicals would've first been stored inside
of a buffer tank and then gradually pumped in in increments.
Because they were doing it by hand, they had skipped that step
and instead, added seven times the legal mass of chemicals into the next tank.
At 10:35 AM, as they added the seventh bucket, the uranium mixture reached critical mass,
which is the minimum amount of material required to begin a nuclear chain reaction.
This chain reaction emitted intense gamma and neutron radiation
directly into the three technicians standing close by.
One worker was sitting at a desk about four meters (13 ft) away.
Another was standing on a platform beside the tank,
and the third was draped over the tank, pouring in the final bucket.
All three of them observed a blue flash,
and then the gamma radiation alarm started sounding all over the plant.
Immediately following the flash as well,
the two closest workers started experiencing intense pain, nausea, and difficulty breathing.
Hisashi Ouchi, who had been draped over the tank, received the most radiation,
and quickly had a hard time moving around, talking, and even staying conscious.
With the alarm sounding, all three men evacuated the building,
but the severity of the situation wasn't apparent just yet.
After exiting the building, another worker saw what rough shape they were in, and so he called an ambulance.
The three men were escorted to a nearby hospital, and this is where the terrifying events would soon be realized.
The Sievert is the unit of measure used to describe the effect of radiation on the human body.
Exposure to one Sievert carries an additional 5.5% chance of developing cancer
at some point during the exposed person's lifetime.
One Sievert is also the maximum amount that a NASA astronaut is allowed to be exposed to
over the course of their entire career.
For context, flight attendants receive about 1/1000th of that on a yearly basis at cruising altitude.
A single full-body CT scan is about 30 times what a flight attendant receives,
but still less than 1/20th of a single Sievert.
Going up the scale, four to five Sieverts is considered to be a fatal dose if it's received in a short span of time.
The technician who was sitting at the desk of four meters away received a dose of three Sieverts.
The technician standing on the platform received a dose of 10 Sieverts.
And Hisashi Ouchi, who was draped over the tank, received a dose of 17 Sieverts.
Hisashi had already vomited violently and passed out before reaching the hospital.
By the time the ambulance had gotten to the hospital,
the radiation burns had become visible over his entire body and his eyes were leaking blood.
When the doctors took his blood, they found that he had almost zero white blood cells left,
meaning that he had almost no immune response.
Doctors moved him to a special area of the hospital to prevent infection
and assess the damage to the rest of his body.
A few days later, he was transferred to the University of Tokyo Hospital
with the hope that revolutionary stem cell transplants might be able to regenerate some of his lost tissue.
Exposure to high doses of radiation is particularly insidious because it causes DNA damage.
DNA is the set of instructions that your cells use to replicate,
and so if it becomes damaged, your cells can no longer replicate.
For example, your skin cells are constantly dying and being replaced by new cells.
Because Hisashi had received so much radiation, his skin wasn't able to regenerate,
and so his first week in intensive care involved countless skin grafts to try to replace the skin
that his body wasn't able to.
Doctors then attempted to use stem cells donated by his sister instead,
but he still had so much radiation coursing through his body - those cells were destroyed as well.
Over weeks of treatment, Hisashi's skin literally melted away from his body.
During this time, Hisashi was in an immense amount of pain and suffering,
but at the wishes of his family, the treatments continued.
He would even cry out that he couldn't take it anymore
and that he wasn't a guinea pig for these experimental treatments.
On day 59 in the hospital, Hisashi had his first heart attack -
again, despite the fact that it was clear at this point that the radiation wasn't treatable.
His family insisted that the doctors revive him.
Over the next few weeks, he suffered from multiple organ failure and brain damage
each time he was revived from a heart attack.
At one point, he would have three heart attacks in a single hour.
Finally, after 83 days of suffering, Hisashi died of one final unrecoverable heart attack.
His coworker who had been standing on the platform would die several months later after a seven-month battle,
and the technician sitting at the desk was released from the hospital with minor radiation sickness
after a couple of months.
The Kennedy family of the United States is almost like the Royal Family in England.
Over a dozen members of the Kennedy family have been active in politics,
entertainment, and business for over a century.
And although former President John F. Kennedy is the most recognizable member of this pseudo-royal family,
the Kennedys were famous long before he was elected.
JFK's father, Joe, was a successful businessman in Boston
and his father, Patrick, was elected into public office in Massachusetts all the way back in 1884.
JFK was actually one of nine kids - three of which would later go into politics,
but this story is about his lesser-known younger sister, Rosemary Kennedy.
Born on September 13th, 1918,
Rosemary was the third-oldest child and the first girl born to Joe and Rose Kennedy.
During her birth, the doctor wasn't immediately available
because he was dealing with an outbreak of the Spanish Flu,
and so the nurse on staff instructed Rose to keep her legs closed,
and even went as far as to physically push the baby's head back in the birth canal for two hours.
With her legs closed, there wasn't enough oxygen in the birth canal,
and this ultimately resulted in Rosemary being born with permanent brain damage.
This wasn't immediately clear until Rosemary started to show signs of being developmentally delayed.
In contrast to her two healthy older brothers,
Rosemary was still having trouble sitting up and crawling at two years old.
This prompted her parents to bring her to a number of specialists
who would link her botched delivery to her disabilities.
At the time, disabilities and especially mental illness were highly stigmatized.
To keep their reputation intact, they decided to keep Rosemary's condition a secret.
Instead of going to a regular school, she was sent to a boarding school for the intellectually-disabled,
which was also conveniently out of the public eye.
Now, despite their efforts to keep Rosemary's condition a secret,
her parents didn't treat her any differently otherwise.
Her diary was later found to be filled with outings to operas, dances, and other social activities.
But her household and her siblings were all very competitive.
This created a frustrating situation where Rosemary was constantly out-competed
by her non-developmentally-disabled siblings.
To make matters worse, her parents believed that by holding her to the same standard
as the rest of her siblings, it would help cure her of her disabilities.
Despite these efforts and a number of tutors and other experimental treatments,
Rosemary's intellectual abilities never developed past a fifth-grade level.
In 1938, Joe was given the role of United States Ambassador to England,
which required the entire family to relocate.
Although her parents had tried to keep her out of the public eye back in the US,
it was impossible to do so in London where they were obligated to attend a number of parties
and other public events.
Despite this, Rosemary flourished in England.
Her parents enrolled her in a convent school
where the nuns provided her with some much-needed support for her disability
and trained her to eventually become a teacher's aide.
She was even presented to the king and queen along with her mother and sister in a debutante ball.
Despite having minimal time to prepare, Rosemary nailed all of the ceremonial customs.
The British press was enamored with her,
and the coverage of the events was focused much more on her than her younger sister.
With the start of World War II in 1938,
the Kennedys returned to the United States, except for Rosemary and her father.
Rosemary was sent to the Montessori Belmont House
which would prove to be an even better environment than the previous convent
and Rosemary was the happiest she'd ever been.
Unfortunately, Joe was forced to resign as ambassador after a series of political missteps.
At which point, Joe and Rosemary were also forced to return to the United States
and rejoin the rest of their family.
Her sister would later write that back in the US, Rosemary regressed significantly.
Removed from her support system and back into the competitive environment of her family,
Rosemary began to have seizures and violent mood swings where she physically assaulted other people.
In addition, she started sneaking out at night, roaming the streets of Washington and going to bars.
Despite the fact that she was 22 at the time, her parents and the nuns at the convent
strongly disagreed with her behavior.
Her older brothers at the time were also being prepared for their promising political careers.
Fearing that her behavior and her disabilities might become public knowledge,
her father arranged for her to undergo a recently developed and controversial medical procedure.
He also never felt the need to tell anyone else in the family, including his wife.
It's also not entirely clear whether or not Rosemary herself even knew the full extent of the procedure
and whether or not she was forced into it.
In November of 1941, Rosemary was brought in for the procedure where she was given a mild tranquilizer.
Then, her head was shaved and she was strapped to an operating table.
The surgeon then made a small incision on either side of her skull near her temple,
no more than an inch wide.
After that, he inserted an instrument resembling a butter knife
and started swinging it up and down to cut brain tissue.
He then asked Rosemary to recite several hymns and songs as he continued to cut away.
When she stopped talking, they knew they had cut far enough.
The procedure that Rosemary had undergone was the Nobel Prize-winning and now-banned lobotomy.
First developed in the 1930s and then popularized in the 1940s and '50s,
a lobotomy is performed by cutting the connection to the prefrontal cortex.
In case it wasn't already obvious, this is maybe not the best idea.
But this was also during a period in history when the highly radioactive radium
was being touted as a cure-all.
So by 1951, almost 20,000 lobotomies had been performed in the United States alone,
despite the fact that it had already been banned by some countries in Europe.
And despite the fact that the American Medical Association strongly advised against the practice,
Joe arranged for it anyway.
Following the procedure, it quickly became apparent that it had not been successful.
It had been disastrous.
Rosemary was no longer able to walk or talk,
she was incontinent, and her mental capacity had been reduced to that of a two-year-old.
In the span of just a couple of minutes,
Rosemary had gone from a blossoming 23-year-old with minor behavioral problems
to requiring almost 24-hour supervision.
Joe then had her sent to a psychiatric hospital in Upstate New York
and forbid any of the family from going to see her.
He allegedly told Rose that visiting her would prevent her from getting accustomed
to her new living arrangements
and told the rest of the family that she was off studying and getting involved in social work.
Her closest sibling and younger sister, Eunice,
even said that she had no idea where Rosemary was for over a decade.
Joe maintained that Rosemary was doing just fine, and then by 1944,
Joe stopped mentioning her entirely in letters that he wrote that were later collected and analyzed.
In 1948, JFK was steadily moving up the political ladder,
and so Joe had her moved once again to an institution in Wisconsin
where she would live for the next 56 years.
In 1958, JFK secretly visited Rosemary and realized the horrific condition she was in
and what had been done to her.
He went on to use his power as president to enact several pieces of legislation
for programs for the disabled.
But it wasn't until 1970, following the death of Joe, that her mother and the rest of family
finally reintegrated Rosemary in their life.
Upon seeing her mother after over 20 years,
Rosemary supposedly recoiled because of how upset she was.
Following her reunion with the family, her siblings and her nieces and nephews did their best
to involve Rosemary in everything they could,
and she would live up the rest of her life in a cottage specifically built for her at the institution in Wisconsin.
She died in 2005 of natural causes, surrounded by her four surviving siblings.
Hello everyone. My name is Sean and welcome to Scary Interesting.
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