Headed for Stanford

[wondersofwine]

I'm so sorry all that happened to you Jackie.
The surgeon's actions certainly sound unethical to me.

[Bucko]

That is strange, because surgical sponges show up on X-ray. Someone blew it.

[Bucko]

It could always be worse -- look at today's news report:

A Minnesota surgeon has agreed to stop seeing patients after he made an "unthinkable" mistake — he removed a healthy kidney, leaving the cancerous one inside a patient, KARE 11 TV reports.

"This has been a tragic event and Park Nicollet has accepted full responsibility," said Dr. Samuel Carlson, chief medical officer for Park Nicollet Health Services.

Carlson declined to name the surgeon who performed the procedure.

Although the surgery was performed last Tuesday, it wasn’t until the next day that pathology reports confirmed the wrong kidney had been taken from the patient, whose identity is not being revealed due to patient confidentiality.

Carlson said standard protocols were followed in the Methodist Hospital operating room to prevent such an occurrence, but new safety protocols have been added. Surgeons now will have to double-check MRIs and CAT scans before starting surgeries, he told the TV station.

[Jackie]

Wow! That's so tragic and so sad. The doctor in this case though seems to care a lot more than mine did. Surgical mistakes happen and it is terrible when they can't be undone. We are so dependent on doctors doing everything right. Literally, you put your life in the doctor's hands when you go into surgery.

Bucko, yes, I too wonder why they didn't see the sponge right away. The surgeon also said something that I have never quite understood. This was 2+ months after the surgery when the sponge was found (by a graduate student) on a cat-scan... She said she didn't understand HOW it got there because it was "the kind of sponge that is normally not used there". (I guess she meant inside the abdominal cavity.) I don't know how she could tell from the marker what kind of sponge it was. I still don't understand why she said that...

Anyway, after she admitted all this to me on the phone, she really clammed up & wasn't open to discussing it anymore. She wanted me to believe that my complications had nothing to do with her mistake. This is not the attitude you want from a surgeon.