2 weeks Ago By BuzzFeed
1. Imagine lying on an operating table, unable to move, speak, or scream — yet fully conscious as the surgeon makes the first incision. This was the horrifying reality for Stacey Gustafson, a Colorado woman who experienced "intraoperative awareness" during a 2019 hernia surgery.
According to her lawsuit, the nightmare started when Gustafson was administered an initial dose of propofol for intubation, but the IV line was disconnected, causing the anesthetic to spill onto her pillow instead of entering her bloodstream...
and no one on the surgery team noticed. As a result, she remained awake but paralyzed. So while she could hear the surgical team talking and even joking — and feel every single cut they made! — she couldn't scream or move to stop the surgeon from cutting into her.
She told Newsweek , "I could feel everything — it was pulling, ripping, burning. And the only way I can think to describe it is just feeling like my insides were being ripped out." She endured excruciating pain for approximately 35 minutes until the surgical team noticed the propofol on the pillow.
Realizing the epic screwup, the medical team administered the correct anesthesia, but the damage was done. Gustafson later recounted: "We're two and a half years out since the surgery, and it affects me every day..
. I have PTSD from it. I still have nightmares.
I get daily flashbacks. This is something that I needed professional help with, so I started therapy." 2.
Dirk Schroeder thought he was walking out of the hospital a survivor. After prostate cancer surgery in 2009, doctors in Germany told the 74-year-old that everything had gone well — so well, in fact, that he could expect to live another six to eight years. The future was bright.
The surgery was successful. Except..
.it wasn't. It wasn’t long before Dirk began experiencing severe pain.
For months, he suffered through it, unsure of what was wrong. Eventually, he returned to doctors, where an investigation (finally!) revealed the true cause. What no one realized — or admitted — was that his surgery had turned into one of the most horrifying cases of medical negligence ever reported.
In what sounds like the plot of a body horror movie , surgeons had accidentally left 16 pieces of medical equipment inside his body. The equipment included: — A six-inch roll of bandage — Several swabs — A needle — A compress And even a piece of a surgical mask Two more operations were needed to clean up the mess. But the damage had already been done — not just physically, but emotionally.
Schroeder died three years later. The cause of death was cancer-related, but his family has long believed the medical error hastened his decline, both physically and psychologically. They have since taken legal action against the hospital in Cologne, seeking roughly $127,000 in damages for what they say was unforgivable negligence.
3. Dr. Christopher Duntsch, a Texas-based neurosurgeon, made a LOT of mistakes .
His malpractice was so egregious, in fact, it earned him the moniker "Dr. Death." He began practicing in the Dallas-Fort Worth area around 2011, and within two years, he had operated on 38 patients, leaving 33 seriously injured and two dead.
One patient, Kellie Martin, died from massive blood loss during a routine procedure, while another, Jerry Summers — Duntsch's childhood friend — woke up a quadriplegic following a botched neck surgery. Was he just wildly incompetent? Maybe — he not only abused drugs but somehow managed to perform less than 100 surgeries while a resident; a typical resident does a thousand — but it's also possible he was a psychopath (he wrote an email that went "I am ready to leave the love and kindness and goodness and patience that I mix with everything else that I am and become a cold blooded killer.").
The REALLY scary part of all of this isn't Duntsch, though. It's the medical system that allowed him to continue practicing and hurting/killing people for so long — two full years! — even when his patients were dying and colleagues were raising concerns. One hospital even allowed Duntsch to resign without reporting him to the National Practitioner Data Bank, enabling him to secure positions at other facilities.
The tipping point came with the case of Mary Efurd, a 72-year-old patient left paralyzed after Duntsch operated on the wrong part of her spine, severed a nerve root, and misplaced surgical hardware. This case, among others, prompted the Texas Medical Board to revoke his license in 2013. In 2015, criminal charges were filed, and in 2017, Duntsch was convicted of injury to an elderly person and sentenced to life in prison, marking a rare instance of a physician being criminally prosecuted for malpractice.
4. In July 2016, a patient named Albert Hubbard underwent a CT scan at St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Unbeknownst to him (and the medical staff, apparently), another man named Albert Hubbard ALSO went for a CT scan that day, and the results showed he needed his kidney removed ASAP. Next thing you know, the healthy Albert Hubbard was called to the hospital, where he was shown a scan of a tumor on his (well, someone's) kidney. "He told me that my kidney had to be removed right away and that I probably had a 43 to 72 percent chance of surviving five years even if the surgery was successful," Hubbard told the Commonwealth Beacon .
"I was in shock, total, complete shock." Soon, Hubbard was wheeled into surgery and had his totally healthy kidney removed. When he woke up from surgery, the surgeon was sitting by his side to inform him of the mistake.
"This couldn’t be happening to me, I kept thinking over and over again in my head," Hubbard said. "It must be a dream and I’ll wake up from it.” Hubbard sued the doctor and hospital, saying that the unneeded surgery led to increased health risks, psychological harm, and unwanted lifestyle changes.
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health investigated and determined that the hospital failed to follow proper patient identification procedures (duh)."The whole thing has made me become somewhat of a recluse," Hubbard said. "I have pulled away from people.
And I have a lot of mistrust right now of all doctors." You're probably thinking, This was the only guy anything like this has ever happened to, right? RIGHT? Well, I'm sorry to say it's not. One study found that this kind of screwup happens in approximately 1 in 112,000 surgical procedures! 5.
In December 2022, 52-year-old John Michael Murdoch went to Oregon Health & Science University to have a breathing hole installed in his neck as part of his treatment for tongue cancer. Horrifyingly, according to a lawsuit filed by his family, Murdoch was awake and conscious when the surgical team accidentally set his face on fire ! After sterilizing Murdoch's face with isopropyl alcohol — but before it completely dried — they used a surgical tool that sparked, igniting the alcohol and setting his face aflame. According to the lawsuit, Murdoch — who died just six months later — was left traumatized and permanently disfigured.
THE SCARIEST PART OF THIS STORY? This is not an isolated incident — surgical fires happen hundreds of times per year, killing one to four people! In fact, the Emergency Care Research Institute (ECRI) has ranked surgical fires as one of its top 10 technological hospital hazards for patients. You've probably never thought about surgical fires before, but they make sense — surgeries generally involve flammable things like curtains and sponges, plus alcohol and oxygen, and potentially spark-throwing tools like electric scalpels. Before you freak out too much, though, please know there are a whopping 400–500 million surgeries per year, so the odds of this happening to you are only something like 0.
00005%. So yeah, you're way more likely to receive someone else's surgery than you are to burst into flames during it. Huzzah! 6.
In what one doctor called "the most bizarre sequence of events that I have heard of in a cardiologic practice" and "one fiasco following another," a surgeon somehow blundered his way into performing open heart surgery on the wrong patient! (Imagine thinking you're being wheeled back for, like, a knee replacement and ending up having your chest cut open!) It happened in 1988 at the University of Florida where a woman underwent a test where a cardiologist threads a probe through a blood vessel to the heart, injects dye, and then watches a monitor to see how the heart reacts. If trouble is found, surgery is scheduled. No trouble was discovered with this patient, but later that day, a DIFFERENT doctor reviewed the video of the test and dictated notes to be typed up by someone else (that feels like a game of telephone, doesn't it?).
Somehow, the healthy patient's name ended up on the report of another woman who had a serious heart valve defect, so she took the report to another doctor for a second opinion. But that doctor didn't examine her! Instead, she was seen by his assistant — who did not have a medical degree! — who recommended she have the surgery. Thankfully, when the surgeon opened her chest and saw a healthy heart, he sewed her back up immediately.
Pretty much every doctor in this story got sued, and the first doctor was ordered to no longer dictate for other doctors. 7. In 2007, 47-year-old Air Force veteran and father of four Benjamin Houghton had testicular cancer — scary, of course — but his doctor reassured him that treatment was straightforward.
All they had to do was to remove the cancerous testicle, and he'd be on the path to recovery. Unfortunately, during surgery, the doctor somehow botched things royally and removed the patient's HEALTHY TESTICLE. How could this happen? A fucked-up blend of mislabeled medical records, confusion in the operating room, and alarmingly insufficient double-checking.
"At first I thought it was a joke," Houghton told the LA Times about learning of the mistake while in recovery. "Then I was shocked. I told them, 'What do I do now?'" Without a healthy testicle, Houghton would go without the testosterone it produced and increase his odds of experiencing sexual dysfunction, depression, fatigue, weight gain, and osteoporosis.
The "wrong-site error" (as it's known in the medical field when docs operate on the wrong limb, organ, etc.) had a major effect on Houghton's life. His wife Monica said, "When I come walking in from work, they (their kids) will say, 'Daddy's having a good day' or 'Daddy's having a bad day.
' Our relationship has changed...
It's hard. I'd like to see it not happen to somebody else." Unsurprisingly, the veteran filed a major malpractice lawsuit against the VA.
8. This kind of thing doesn't just happen to regular people — it happens to celebrities, too. Saturday Night Live star Dana Carvey (you know, Garth from Wayne's World ) began experiencing chest pains in 1997 and was diagnosed with a blocked artery.
Doctors recommended double bypass heart surgery, and Carvey — like any rational person — trusted that his surgical team would, you know, fix the blockage. But what actually happened was that the surgeon bypassed the wrong artery! Carvey went through an incredibly invasive heart procedure — cracked chest, anesthesia, weeks of recovery — and the actual problem was still sitting there, completely unaddressed. "I remember just lying in my bed just sobbing," Carvey told the San Francisco Chronicle .
"To go through all that and not have the problem fixed is horrifying." Carvey filed a $7.5-million lawsuit against the surgeon, accusing the doctor of medical negligence.
Carvey wasn't just concerned for himself — he wanted to make sure it never happened to anyone else. "This is not about money," he said at the time. "This is about accountability and patient safety.
" After reaching a settlement (the amount was never publicly disclosed), Carvey donated the entire sum to charity — specifically to organizations focusing on heart disease and education. "It's not like you went in for an ear piercing and they pierced the wrong ear," Carvey quipped to David Letterman , highlighting the seriousness of the situation. "This is my heart.
" 9. In 2007, a hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, performed brain surgeries on the wrong side of their patients' heads not once, not twice, but THREE separate times . First, in January, an elderly patient was supposed to have surgery on their brain's right hemisphere but underwent a procedure on the left instead.
Thankfully, the error was quickly identified, and a second operation corrected the initial mistake. Did the hospital overhaul its procedures after this mess-up? Nope. Just a few months later, another patient entered surgery to treat bleeding on one side of his brain, but due to a misunderstanding of the CT scan orientation, the literal brain surgeon drilled into the wrong side of the patient's skull.
The surgical team scrambled to fix their error — again subjecting a patient to unnecessary trauma and danger. You'd think the hospital would've instituted radical safety improvements by this point, right? Well, apparently not. Finally, in November, surgeons AGAIN operated on the wrong side of a patient's head due to confusion over surgical site markings and inadequate pre-surgery checks.
The third time was a charm (I guess?), as it finally sparked major outrage and national media attention. The Department of Health fined the hospital $50,000, implemented strict oversight, and temporarily required external surgeons to monitor surgeries. Yikes.
10. In 2003, 17-year-old Jesica Santillan, suffering from a life-threatening heart and lung condition, was admitted to Duke University Medical Center for a rare and complex double-organ transplant. During the operation, it was discovered that a shockingly boneheaded mistake had been made — the donor organs were type A, while Jesica's blood type was O-positive, a mismatch that should have been identified long before surgery.
Despite immediate efforts to stabilize her condition, including the use of immunosuppressant drugs and plasmapheresis, Jesica's body began to reject the organs. In a desperate attempt to save her life, Jesica received a second heart and lung transplant on Feb. 20, 2003.
Although the new organs were a match, the damage from the initial transplant had already taken a toll. Jesica suffered severe brain damage and passed away on Feb. 22.
It was later revealed that multiple checkpoints failed to verify the blood type compatibility between Jesica and the donor organs. The hospital admitted to the error and implemented new safety protocols, including mandatory triple-checks of blood type compatibility before any transplant surgery. Hospitals nationwide have since reevaluated their transplant protocols to help prevent a foul-up this monumental from ever happening again.
11. In 1951, two baby girls were born in a small Wisconsin hospital: Martha Miller and Sue McDonald. Due to a tragic mix-up, they were sent home with the wrong families — a mistake that went undiscovered for 43 years.
Mary Miller, Martha's mother, suspected the error almost immediately. She noticed that the baby she brought home weighed two and a half pounds less than at birth and sneezed five times in a row (something none of her other babies did). Her husband, Reverend Norbert Miller, dismissed her concerns, and Mary, who soon fell ill and almost died, let it go.
Mary and Kay McDonald, Sue's mother, knew each other, and over the years, she even suggested that their daughters might have been switched. Kay, however, found the idea implausible and paid it little mind. It wasn't until 1994, when long-simmering suspicions led them to take blood tests, that their true parentages were confirmed.
The revelation was life-altering. Both of the switched babies, now adults, felt connections to their biological families (Sue, for example, shared her father's near-fanatical devotion to Christ like her biological father, the reverend), but also remained close to the families they grew up with. So, it seems their story ended as well as could be hoped, but it all could have been prevented if not for one boneheaded mistake — the kind of mistake, like all these mistakes, we trust medical professionals to never, ever make.
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