So I’m sure you’ve heard the stories about people going in for surgery and the surgeon operated on the wrong body part. I know I had but I always thought it was one of those tall tails that didn’t happen very often until today. My co-worker’s mom went into surgery yesterday for a repair to her ACL. The doctor signed the leg that he was supposed to do surgery on and then left the nurses to prep her mom. During that time some of the nurses went on lunch break and others took over. During the middle of this somehow the nurses ended up prepping the wrong leg. The surgeon started performing surgery on the wrong leg and got in and couldn’t find anything wrong with the ACL but stated sometime the ACL starts to repair and therefore kept scraping the tendon away trying to find the problem. He finally realized that they were on the wrong leg too late and then had to replace that tendon because of all the damage caused while in there. He then called my co-workers father and told him what happened and asked if he wanted the surgeon to still fix the bad leg (the leg he was supposed to fix in the first place). They decided they might as well go ahead and fix it. She now has had both tendons replaced even though only one was supposed to be fixed.
I can’t even begin to imagine especially if the surgeon had signed the leg that he was supposed to do surgery on how you mess up like that. Sad to say, as I’m not a suing kind of person, but this is a lawsuit waiting to happen and this is why our health insurance premiums are so high. We all make mistakes believe me I make mistakes in my job time and again its just doctors have a higher risk when they make mistakes.
A similar thing happened to me when I was 11/2 yars old. Except that it was the hip. This happens all to often. The hospital mismarked the xrays. then prepped the wrong hip and the surgon cut into the hip before realizing the error. I hacd to have a total replacemnt of that hip at 34 years old and now have had it revised.