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!
