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These are Ten Horrifying Stories That Will Make You Scared of Going to Hospitals
We hope that not one of them ever happens to you.
Being a professional in the medical field is never easy; countless lives are on the line every time a patient walks in through the hospital door. Healing people is a huge responsibility, which is why it is of great importance that health professionals maintain a high level of excellence and expertise in their field.
However, there are some instances when doctors, nurses, and other allied health professionals make mistakes; after all, they are humans too. Nevertheless, it’s downright horrifying thinking about botched surgeries and wrong lab results and medicines administered. There are several notorious stories of surgeons leaving foreign articles inside their patient’s body which made headlines and macabre accounts of human experimentation done before the advent of research ethics.
We rounded up some of the worst medical mistakes ever recorded, and we hope that not one of them ever happens to you.
#10. Wrong daddy, Doctor!
A woman received in vitro fertilization in an unspecified clinic in New York City. Months after, when the baby was delivered, the unsuspecting parents realized that their child was a few shades darker than their complexion. Apparently, the doctors in the clinic used another man’s sperm by mistake.
#9. Matching is always important
Because our bodies tend to attack anything that it considers foreign, doctors must always ensure that any organ to be transplanted to another person must always match. Unfortunately, in the case of Jessica Santillan, she received a heart and lungs that didn’t match her, leading to her death.
#8. Not the other nut
An Air Force veteran who underwent testicle removal at West Los Angeles VA Medical Center for fear of cancer got his wrong testicle removed, leading to a lawsuit filed by the veteran and his wife.
#7. Retractor detected!
A man had his tumor removed from his abdomen at the University of Washington Medical Center; once he recovered, he discovered that doctors forgot to remove a 13-inch long retractor from his abdomen.
#6. Whooops, wrong patient.
What if you you went in for a test and then suddenly you’re being wheeled in for an invasive heart procedure?
This what exactly happened to a 67-year-old woman when she went to a hospital for cerebral angiography. The next day, doctors accidentally performed a cardiac electrophysiology study on her. Realizing their mistake an hour into the procedure, doctors aborted the study and brought her back to her room.
#5. Right procedure, wrong side.
Doctors at Rhode Island Hospital operated on an 82-year-old woman to stop bleeding in her skull. The neurosurgeon began her operation by drilling a hole on the right side of her head, although her CT scan showed that her bleeding was actually on the left side of her head.
#4. No, the other leg!
This incident is quite similar with the previous case, but this time it involved the amputation of the wrong leg. Doctors removed the wrong leg of a 52-year-old man in 1995; by the time that they noticed that they were operating on the wrong leg, they were too far gone and had to remove it.
#3. Are you “kidney” me?!
A patient in Park Nicollet Methodist Hospital, Minnesota underwent kidney removal due to cancer. However, doctors discovered that they made a mistake when they had the removed organ tested for cancer.
#2. “I’m awake and I can feel the pain…”
A man from West Virginia was driven to commit suicide after he underwent exploratory surgery in Raleigh General Hospital. In order to determine the cause of his abdominal pain, doctors conducted exploratory surgery. Although the man was given anaesthesia for the procedure, he could feel the pain and discomfort but could not move or communicate. The traumatic experience led him to take his own life.
#1. “Which artery is it again?”
Doctors mistakenly bypassed the wrong artery during a double bypass operation on Dana Carvey, leading to another emergency operation to remove the block from the correct artery.