30 Wild Mistakes Medical Professionals Made During Surgery

Did you know tonsils can regenerate?
30 Wild Mistakes Medical Professionals Made During Surgery

Of course, human beings are prone to making mistakes on the job, but we prefer to believe this isn’t true for surgeons. No one wants to think that a medical professional is capable of leaving an entire scalpel inside of you or performing surgery on the wrong knee. But oops! they are, and the following Redditors have tales that will blow your mind. 

As a heads up, if you’re being operated on any time soon, you’ll definitely want to click away — especially if you’re set for spinal surgery.    

maumacd 7y ago Had an ear surgery to remove a cholesteatoma (tumor/cyst thing). Yeah, doc ended up just carving out my whole middle ear and not doing any reconstruction work. My next ear surgeon who was doing the reconstruction work was like, yeah, last doc was basically a butcher. 11 ...
 7y ago My friend's dad went in to have his right hip replaced and awoke to a sore left hip. Yep, they managed to replace to wrong one. 668 ...
PM_ME_STEAMGAMES_PLS o 7y ago Some nerves got mixed up during an eye surgery and now I have some sort of Amblyophia, when I try to change focus from afar to near my left eye moves. 45 ...
RockOutRex 7y ago I got my tonsils removed when I was a kid. However, a small piece was overlooked on the right side. Turns out they can regenerate. Welcome back. 934 ...
almightyshadowchan 10y ago I wasn't present for this, but I got to deal with the fallout. Client brings his cat (found as a stray) to be spayed. The vet (my boss) preps cat for surgery and begins cutting...and can't find the uterus or ovaries... Uh oh. Cat is a male! And poor kitty just had his belly sliced open for no reason whatsoever. The owner was, understandably, furious. 856 ...
PowerWordCoffee e 10y ago I woke up during the last part of my gal bladder removal. I felt this pressure, as my surgeon (had him for a prior operation, funny guy) was trying to close one of the wounds. I lifted my head, we locked eyes and he had this startled 'Oh fuck', look. Then he snapped back to normal, said Patient's up, and the anaesthetist was on that shit. Woke up an hour later in recovery. 1.8K ...
DrShlomo 10y ago This one's from my dad: We were putting up a central line for a drip with an 18G needle (1.2mm- relatively big compared to most needles) in the patient's external jugular, and all of a sudden the needle went right into the jugular. We all started panicking because usually with a drip the needle is meant to come out and only the plastic remains, but now we had lost the needle inside this guys jugular. Before we could even fish it out it was gone, I looked at the fellow surgeons and nurses and before we could
Roo_Badley 10y ago Not a surgeon, but I was observing a hand surgery about a year ago at a teaching hospital. The surgeon was removing one of the carpals (the bones near the base of the hand) to be used later. A nurse was given the carpal to hold until it needed to be used. She ended up dropping the patient's bone on the ground. 46 ...
markko79 10y ago Nurse here. I was assisting with a simple vasectomy and the doctor was having trouble differentiating the vas deferens from the testicular artery. I stopped him just before he cut the artery. If he cut that, the testicle would die... not to mention make a very bloody mess. 444 ...
 10y ago . Edited 10y ago Way way back in the day pre-op was done with alcohol-based cleaners. Naked, sedated guy with a light sheen of cleaning fluid on him + static electric spark = fully engulfed in flames. Everyone just stood there for a second til someone grabbed a sheet and put out the flames. Surgery went well, no complications, slight sun tan.
Khanyi86 2y ago MBChB I started an IV and immediately (and accidentally) ripped it out of the patient when | turned around because the line on the drip bag was hooked around my arm. Blood got everywhere, but I tried again and didn't rip it out the second time 163 ...
Hydroxyapatite_... 4y ago Edited 4y ago I was working in an animal research lab, and my job was to make incisions and insert catheters into the hearts of rabbits through the carotid artery. I had a defective catheter with a sharp tip, and somehow I managed to have the catheter exit the carotid somewhere in the chest cavity of the rabbit. I had to step aside for a more experienced surgeon to take over from there because my confidence was shaken. Luckily she was able to save the rabbit!
ForceGhostBuster 2y ago DO-PGY1 I knocked a patient's tooth out while intubating on an anesthesia rotation. In all fairness, I had an attending and CRNA supervising me, and none of us saw it happen. We didn't know until blood started coming out from around one of the patient's front teeth after the intubation was done. 166 ...
thebluestblue1 4y ago My friend had their kneecap broken during surgery for a torn ACL. Apparently they lightly tap on the kneecap and the surgeon probably tapped it a little too hard and it broke. They were on crutches for a couple years and still have a lot of knee problems now. 14 ...
acpenaa 5y ago My brother broke his arm (on his 6th birthday ofc). Had to get pins put in. Не wakes up from the surgery and tells the nurses that his fingers feel kinda numb. Turns out that the pins had been placed wrong, and if he hadn't said anything he probably would have serious damage to that hand 172 ...
greffedufois 4y ago I was the patient. I had a liver transplant and was having an ercp done to place a new bile duct stent. Well apparently my anatomy is different than normal, and my lungs go more down my sides. So he accidentally caused a nick, which caused a hemothorax. So when I woke up I couldn't breathe, they did an xray and had to do a chest tube. Eventually I was so exhausted I asked to be vented so he vented me. Apparently he cried he felt so bad about it all. But it wasn't him being malicious
bearsbeetsbutts 4y ago Not the surgeon, but I am a nurse in a hospital. Without going into toooo much detail, I had a patient who bled into her abdomen for 10 minutes during surgery without anyone noticing. The surgeon was focused on fixing a smaller bleed in another location. 281 ...
Thunderberries 4y ago Not a doctor but a patient. I had a shoulder replacement and one of the doctors nicked an artery. They were panicking to try and find the nick, doing everything and whenever they saw it, it filled with blood. At some point he got sight of it and jabbed at it with the clamps and finally got it. Problem was, there is a cluster of nerves directly behind the artery. So after they fixed up the nick they had to go through the process of checking if they damaged the nerves and if my fingers still worked.
KrisPBacon0905 5y ago Not a doctor but my dad was getting a cardiac catheterization done and the doc forgot to give him a local anesthetic. The nurses were very confused when he turned stark white and almost passed out until they realized he wasn't given anything to numb the pain. Funny thing about is my dad was to embarrassed to say something about the Excruciating pain he was feeling bc he didn't want to be seen as a big baby. Smh. 126 ...
EaterOfFood 5y ago Some years ago my wife went in for surgery and we asked to have her tubes tied at the same time. After the surgery, the doctor came out to talk with me. Не told me the surgery went great and that she's just coming out of the anesthesia now. I asked about the tubes, and his eyes got really wide. Не said, I'll be back in a few minutes and practically ran back to the OR. They had to put her back under and re-open the sutures. I'm glad I asked about that, or we might have
bugspotter 4y ago When I was in residency my first solo procedure was a spinal surgery on a sixteen year old kid, a girl. And at the end, after thirteen hours, I was closing her up and I, I accidentally ripped her dural sac, shredded the base of the spine where all the nerves come together, membrane as thin as tissue. And so it ripped open and the nerves just spilled out of her like angel hair pasta, spinal fluid flowing out of her and I... and the terror was just so crazy. So real. And I knew I had
Slamsquatchys 4y ago Med student, so I was just there to observe. Elderly lady with dementia in for an above knee amputation. After cutting through her tissue to expose her femur, the surgeon started with the bone saw and within a few seconds started cursing and everyone around him seemed perplexed. Turns out the patient had a rod in her femur that the surgeon did not know about. A few other surgeons came rushing in a few minutes later and they all figured it out eventually (with a mallet and lots of pounding). had a lot of questions but was
Dread_Wolf 4y ago I had kidney operation when I was about a year or two old. The kind surgeon managed to stich me up with a 2cm long piece of tube still inside of me. When they realised, it was a bit too late. I was screened annually to see if the tube inside of me didn't cause any problems, which it did not for over a decade. Fast-forward to me being 14 or 15, taking a piss and seeing something slowly slithering out of my penis. My first thought was that it was a parasite of some sort, and
 5y ago I'm currently in medschool, and this happened a few years ago when I was attending surgery classes. One patient was up for a laparotomy for removal and investigation of an abdominal mass - probably cancer. Imaging tests were really not specific or of much help, as this was some atypical disease presentation - even specialists couldn't figure it out. To everyone's surprise, the patient's cancer was really a forgotten gauze from some previous surgery. The actual moment of realization went as the surgeon just stopped and said: gauze!; to which the nurse promptly gave him one, and he went: No.
Icnaredef 4y ago Med student here, I was watching a knee operation when the surgeon suddenly stopped, looked towards the staff absolutely shocked and asks this is the wrong knee, isn't it? Basically he was told to operate the wrong knee and halway trough he realized it was too good looking to be the knee that needed the operation. Luckily there was no permanent damage done, the team reknit everything together and rescheduled the surgery. 4.3K ...
 4y ago Not a surgeon but work for pathology. An oncologist I met at the lab would tell me all of these horror stories. Will never forget about the one time a nurse threw someone's donated organ transplant into the rubbish bin or when a man had the wrong leg cut off. 1.9K ...
we_need2talk . 4y ago Once left a scalpel inside someone's chest 170 ...
Cinemaphreak . 4y ago . Edited 4y ago My mother's surgeon: Well, not doing basic math correctly and sewing up a woman having spine surgery with 2 sponges still inside of her.
anutteranceofshush 4y ago Edited 4y ago Not a surgeon but I am a histotech (we work in the pathology lab where all the specimens are sent). A surgeon did a double mastectomy based off a different hospital systems pathology report. Basically the report said she had the kind of breast cancer where both breasts need to be removed. But we found zero cancer in either breast. Не was shitting bricks so we submitted both breasts IN THEIR ENTIRETY... That's a ton of blocks and it's unheard of to submit all the tissue like this but he needed to find cancer.
pics-or-didnt-happen 7y ago They put my left nut back in backwards and still twisted. You'd be amazed how much this can affect your mood/life. 7 ...

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