You’ll often hear inspiring headlines about one in a million surgeries pulled off by talented
surgeons and dedicated nurses, improving or even saving the lives of patients. But for every
dream come true, there’s always a nightmare. We’re talking about the real hack-jobs - sawn-off limbs,
tangled tubes, horrifying body cavity souvenirs, and even one exceptional case:
A surgery with a 300% mortality rate. If you’re eating, now is the time to stop, cause we’re
about to get nasty, weird, and gross. These are some of history’s most insane surgical mistakes.
While things are arguably much better now, medical malpractice was horrifyingly common far
more recently than you’d think. Harvard University conducted a study into New York hospitals in 1991,
finding that one in twenty-five patients were victims of medical malpractice. But thankfully,
even then, the cases we’re talking about today are exceptional, and exceptionally horrible,
to boot. There’s even a term for them in medical lingo: “Never events”,
meaning things that should never happen. But they do, and all too often, in fact.
First, let’s talk about horrifying cases of mistaken identity - when people are given
surgeries intended for others due to egregious clerical errors. Take 81-year-old Bimla Nayyar,
for instance. She was supposed to receive surgery for a jaw displacement in Oakwood
Hospital, Michigan. However, she was about to experience something a whole lot worse.
Doctors at the hospital mixed up Nayyar’s CT scan with that of another patient
and mistakenly assumed that she was experiencing bleeding from the brain.
Nayyar was rushed into brain surgery immediately, sawing the right side of her skull open only to
find...no bleeding. When the surgery was over, Nayyar needed to be kept on life support in a
comatose state for sixty days. When her recovery was deemed extremely improbable, the ventilator
was turned off and Nayyar died. All because of a damaged jaw and extreme medical negligence.
Unsurprisingly, her family filed a lawsuit and was awarded $21 million.
Back in 1995, Dr. Rolando R. Sanchez was a menace to anyone who liked keeping their limbs. In the
first of his two nightmare surgeries, Dr. Sanchez was amputating a patient’s leg. However, half way
through the surgery he noticed that his nurse had begun to cry. She tearfully told him that
he was amputating the wrong leg, and Dr. Sanchez was furious. He blamed pretty much everyone but
himself - including his team - and even said that he hadn’t done anything wrong, because the
leg he was cutting off was also diseased, and he probably would have needed to do it later anyway.
Incidentally, nurses in Tampa, Florida, have figured out a method of preventing
this kind of wrongful amputation: Writing the word “NO!” on the arm
or leg that isn’t meant to be amputated. It’s very Florida, but hey, if it works, it works.
Dr. Sanchez would return to perform another feat of epic medical malpractice before finally losing
his medical license. Mildred Shuler needed some infected tissue cut from her right foot in what
should have been a very simple operation, but Dr. Sanchez always liked to go above and beyond. He
took the entire big toe on Mildred’s right foot, insisting it was necessary. The medical board
insisted it was necessary that Dr. Sanchez no longer be allowed to practice shortly thereafter.
In April 2015, 49-year-old Eduvigis Rodriguez also found herself missing some pieces. After
finding a lump in one of her breasts and going to the hospital about it, she was misdiagnosed
with breast cancer and had one of her breasts removed in a hospital in Manhattan. However,
analysis on the severed breasts instead discovered that the lump had actually been a benign growth,
and that the breast did not, in fact, need to be removed. Though to play devil’s advocate,
it’s generally better to be safe than sorry when it comes to breast cancer.
Speaking of “sorry”, a hospital in Lebanon,
Tennessee, needed to apologise profusely to Nate Melton and his mother, Jennifer,
after a pretty heinous mix up. Nate Melton was literally one day old when he
became the recipient of an unneeded frenectomy, otherwise known as a “tongue clipping” surgery.
This procedure cuts the tissue that connects the tongue to the floor of the mouth. Nurses came to
take Jennifer Melton’s brand new baby away for what she thought was a standard check up, only
to find - to her horror - that the doctor was performing surgery. As you’ve probably guessed
already, he’d been mixed up with another patient. Jennifer got her lawyers involved shortly after.
During the 2010s, a doctor from Sheffield, UK, proved to be a serial surgical bungler. In a
more minor act of medical stupidity, he removed a skin tag instead of a cyst. However, in a more
severe example of malpractice, he botched two different appendectomies. In the first,
he simply removed some fat from a woman who needed the surgery, leaving her in terrible pain until
the second surgery could be performed. But even that pales in comparison to a 2015 incident where,
during an appendectomy, he removed a woman’s ovary and Fallopian tube during the surgery. He said,
in his own defense, that the organs looked very similar to an appendix due to his poor eyesight.
The UK Medical board could see a little clearer,
and decided to permanently ban this negligent doctor from treating patients again.
We can all rest a little easier now knowing that guy won’t be handling a scalpel at work anymore.
But here’s the thing: While we’re all now probably feeling a little paranoid about an
incompetent doctor sawing off the wrong limb or taking out one of our perfectly healthy organs,
it’s not always what these screwy surgeons take that’s the problem. Sometimes, the issue is
what they accidentally leave behind. This may seem like a rare incident, but it’s actually
upsettingly common. There are several thousand instances of medical supplies being left behind
in patients after surgery every year, and that’s in the United States alone.
Though with the cost of healthcare, you’d probably want to get some freebies with your surgery.
The grand majority of the medical equipment left inside patients is medical gauze and sponges,
but in the minority of cases, actual surgical tools are left behind. In one incredibly bizarre
case, a man from the Czech Republic somehow had a foot-long pipe left inside his body after surgery,
which then needed to be removed a month later in a subsequent surgery.
In another paranoia-inducing case, Air Force Major Erika Parks had just given birth with
the help of an emergency C-Section. However, unlike most people who’ve just given birth,
her stomach continued to grow. She also became severely ill, and began to experience abdominal
pains. She was rushed into surgery, only for doctors to find the culprit:
A surgical sponge from the earlier C-Section had become wrapped up in her intestines,
swelling and becoming infected inside her body. It took a six hour surgery
to finally remove the sponge. It would have been easier to just not leave it in there.
Even hearing about some of these cases can be cringe-inducing. A man undergoing treatment for
cancer in Wisconsin somehow had a 13 inch surgical retractor left inside his body.
A woman undergoing surgery for uterine cancer had a small pair of surgical scissors left inside her
body. A woman undergoing a hysterectomy once somehow even had a whole surgical
glove left inside her body in the aftermath. Much like Major Parks and the surgical sponge,
these cases can be incredibly dangerous as well as uncomfortable and painful,
because foreign objects left inside the body can massively increase risk of infection.
But if you think everything you’ve heard before was bad,
trust us, it can always get worse. What comes after will make a stolen
toe or a misplaced scalpel seem like a pleasant medical experience by comparison.
We’re warning you: This next one is probably the most disgusting surgical mistake on this list.
Put down that sandwich or you’re really gonna regret it. The story of a 31-year-old Chilean
woman named Yasna Cortes Caceres hit headlines in 2018, after she signed up for a basic Fallopian
tube-tying operation in Quilque Hospital, central Chile. As a mother of four children already,
Miss Caceres wanted to put her reproduction on hold until further notice. However,
the surgery was botched in a particularly horrifying manner after two cuts in her large
intestine caused a fistula to develop. And that’s as unpleasant as it sounds:
A fistula is an abnormal connection forming between two hollow spaces in the body.
In this case, there was an unnatural overlap between her intestines and her reproductive
organs. This result is that Miss Caceres was suddenly defecating through her vagina,
a gross and embarrassing problem that also led to her needing to buy over a hundred dollars worth of
colostomy bags every single day. The employees at Quilque Hospital did apologise profusely for
their mistake here, and have been providing subsequent surgeries in hopes of solving the
problem. We don’t actually have any details on that, so we can only hope that Miss Caceres is
satisfied with the results. Personally, we just wish we could forget about it.
And finally, the most insane surgical mistake of all: The legendary surgery with a 300% mortality
rate. How is such a thing even possible, you’re probably wondering? It definitely wasn’t easy,
but an exceptional mistake takes an exceptional surgeon, and the 19th Century Scottish master of
amputation, Robert Liston, was truly exceptional. You see, in the early 1800s, anesthesia wasn’t
all that popular in surgery, so grisly procedures like amputations were performed while the patient
was still conscious. This is as horrible as it sounds - there was lots of screaming and thrashing
involved, and every surgery required a team of strong assistants to hold the patient in place.
Given that undergoing this kind of surgery was horrible, short surgeries began to equal
successful surgeries, and Liston was famed for being the fastest amputator in the UK.
He even had the cocky catchphrase “Time me, gentlemen” before he took to sawing.
He could apparently even take off a leg in two minutes,
which - for using a hand saw on a screaming, wriggling patient - is pretty damn impressive.
But it was his legendary off-day that allows him to endure in the history of surgical weirdness.
During this fateful surgery, Liston was doing his thing, sawing like a madman to remove his
patient’s leg as quickly as possible. However, an assistant got too close, and accidentally lost a
few of his fingers to Liston’s masterful blade-work. Earlier in that same surgery,
Liston accidentally cut into the clothes of an elderly surgeon supervising the expert butchery.
While Liston hadn’t actually cut the old surgeon, he was still covered in blood
from the messy surgery, and assumed that Liston had severed something important.
The old man collapsed and died of a heart attack on the spot. That’s fatality number one.
Fatality number two was the death of the assistant who’d lost some of his fingers.
Apparently, the saw was less than clean, resulting in the assistant later contracting gangrene
and dying from his infected injuries. Oh, and as the cherry on top of this excessively bloody cake,
the patient didn’t pull through either. Three people dead,
one surgery. Liston managed to pull off the only surgery with a 300% mortality
rate - an achievement he was probably less proud of than his impressive cutting time.
So there you have it, some of history’s bloody, disgusting, and downright insane surgical
mistakes. In case you’re thinking of putting off your next doctor's appointment after this, don’t
sweat it, these cases are the exceptions rather than the rule. But hey, if you do find yourself
on the receiving end of a horrifying surgical mistake, at least you might make the next video!
Now check out “What if you Wake Up During Surgery?”
and “Crazy Things a Doctor Removed from Inside a Person’s Body” for more surgical nightmares!