Recently, in another state, a man has accused a doctor of having made a rather major mistake during a surgery.
The man says that, in January 2013 at a hospital in New York, the doctor performed a surgery on him that was supposed to be an appendectomy. The man claims that the doctor made a rather glaring omission during the procedure: failing to actually remove his appendix. Instead of the appendix, the doctor removed a yellowish mass, the man alleges.
According to the man, even after a pathology report was made at the hospital indicating that what was removed from him wasn’t his appendix, he was not told of the fact that his appendix had not been removed.
The man says that this resulted in him going 14 months with his appendix still being inside of him and him not knowing it. The appendix’s presence eventually caused the man to suffer extreme pain while he was on vacation, at which point a surgery was performed on him in which the appendix was actually removed. The above-mentioned doctor and the above-mentioned hospital are being sued by the man over the failure to remove the appendix in the January 2013 surgery.
One could imagine how truly shocking and horrifying it would be as a patient to discover that something that you had every reason to believe had been done during a surgery hadn’t actually been done. Major negligent omissions during a surgery and failure by health care providers to disclose them can cause a patient great harm, as it can lead to a patient unknowingly having an untreated/unaddressed medical condition for an extended period of time.
An important thing for patients here in Illinois who have suffered negligent omissions or some other type of improper health care provider conduct during a surgery to know is that they may be able to seek compensation to help them deal with the costs and impacts the negligence caused them to face. Medical malpractice lawsuits are one of the mechanisms for pursuing such compensation.
Source: CBS New York, “Bronxville Man Sues After Undergoing Second Appendectomy,” April 10, 2014