(Newswire.net — July 4, 2017) — A hospital visit is never pleasant. However, for the most part, you go in with a problem and you come out fit and healthy. No worries, no lingering issues. But human error plays a role as much in the hospital setting as it does anywhere else, and because lives are at stake, bodies are opened and closed, and injections are given on a daily basis, a lot can go wrong.
If you are squeamish, then you should probably avoid reading this article, because these are some of the scariest cases of medical malpractice.
Left or Right?
Brain surgery is generally considered to be one of the most complicated things that a human can do. You accept that things can go wrong, but you hope that the surgeon gets the basics right. For one year in the Rhode Island Hospital, this didn’t happen. In fact, in that year they mistakenly operated on the wrong side of the brain in three different cases!
Telling your left from your right is as basic as it gets, and something you would expect a professional brain surgeon to nail down. They didn’t though. In the first case, someone forgot to mark down the right side of the brain and admitted they didn’t understand a lot of what they were doing.
It also wasn’t marked down the second time, with the doctor confident enough in his memory to get it right. The final case was even more bizarre, as it was clear which side they should have operated on, but they proceeded to operate on the other side.
Pecs to Breasts
Alexander Baez decided to get pec implants. The former bodybuilder was focused on the perfect physique, even though age was letting him down. He knew the implants would defy time and give him immediate results. Except, the person he hired was merely masquerading as a professional surgeon and Mr Baez ended up with C-cup breasts instead.
When found and arrested, authorities learned that this fake doctor had operated on over one hundred patients.
Kim Tutt
After being told that she had a growth in her jaw and only had a few months left to live if it wasn’t removed, Kim Tutt immediately agreed to undergo surgery. She underwent several surgeries and was left disfigured, her life changed forever and she had to face a picture of life-saving surgeries and months of healing.
After all of this hardship she was finally told by her doctor that she was cancer free. The excitement turned to disbelief quickly though as Tutt was then told that she never had cancer in the first place. There had been a mix-up with the test results. Her life was never threatened. The growth was not what they said it was, and she was left disfigured from a medical mistake that would come to rule her life.
The Scary Stats
If you think that these cases are rare then you would be right, but medical malpractice is not so rare on the whole and there are many “lesser” cases than these every year. In fact, it has been estimated that every year there are more than 1,500 cases of foreign objects being left in patients after operations.
So, if you have been in to have your appendix removed and now you occasionally hear your bowels ringing, the good news is that you could have yourself a new iPhone. The bad news, well, you probably don’t want to hear that.