Nice Tan.
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. Source
Um…Where’s The Needle?
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 do anything we rushed him right into theater. After a few minutes we fished the needle out near his subclavian vein- closer towards the shoulder- and we breathed a sigh of relief. Source
Is It A Boy Or A Girl?
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. Source
Luckiest Bastard Ever.
I was a junior doctor working in neurosurgery back in 2008 when one of the senior registrars (I suppose the equivalent is chief resident in the USA) told me his most unfortunate moment. In order to have a patient’s head stabilised for surgery he was using a frame that had a set of 3 spikes that held the head in place. Due to the angle he needed to approach from, this required the patient to be face down. As he was placing the head of the anaesthatised patient on to the frame the head slipped and his eye landed on to the spike, perforating the eyeball. Panicking and thinking that his career was now over, he then (rather bizarely) started poking at the eyeball trying to work out what was what until the anaesthetist told him to stop. They then called the ophthalmologist who came to tidy up what was now a completely ruined eye. After the surgery, terrified, he went to explain to the patient what had happened. Understandably fearing the worst, anger, distress and tears, received the response of “that’s OK I was blind in that eye anyway!”. Luckiest bastard ever. Source
When The Surgeon Is More Freaked Than The Patient.
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 f‘, look. Then he snapped back to normal, said “Patient’s up”, and the anaesthetist was on that s. Woke up an hour later in recovery. Source
Guts, Guts Everywhere.
I was in charge in the unit the other day, and this happened… We had a patient in the ICU who had some big abdomen trauma. He had gone to the OR and was too sick to be able to close his abdomen, so we left it open. We had a piece of plastic covering, like a bag, covering his intestines and then we placed a vacuumed sponge dressing on top of that, called a woundvac. The patient’s nurse called me into the room to look at the abdomen because she thought she saw pieces of the bowel seeping out of the bag and getting sucked against the woundvac. I agreed and thought the bowel looked pretty dusky as well, so we called the doc to come and look at it. The resident agreed and talked to his attending who told him to take the woundvac off, tuck the bowel back into the bag it had escaped from and put a new woundvac on. It all just sounded like it was going to be a disaster, but whatever. So, resident comes in, takes off the woundvac and the bowels had become very swollen from the fluids, trauma, etc… so when he took the woundvac off, they all slipped out of the patient. The bag had dislodged significantly. We would tuck the bowels in one side, they’d spill out the other. Here we had this guy in his bed, disemboweling and we simply could not get everything back in him, in the bag, or anything. Luckily, the drugs we had the patient on kept him very nicely sedated and we had other drugs to control any problems with his blood pressure and the guy wasn’t overtly bleeding… it was MESSY. We really just had to step back and say “Well, shit. How do we get this guys guts back inside him!?” Ended up having to call in 6 other people to help tuck things here and there until he could get back to the OR for them to get everything back into its proper place…Source
“We Have A Pumper!”
Had a friend with a swollen area on his lower back where it got to the point where he could barely sit. So he goes to his family doctor, the doc, says yea that’s a pilonidal cyst, we should probably go ahead and take care of that. He told my friend to take off his shirt and lay flat on his stomach. So he’s laying there and waiting and the doctor says your going to feel a poke, and is at this point expecting a local. Well first it turns out the “poke” was actually a scalpel, not a local. He said it basically felt like someone took a fire hot poker and drove it into his back. He then hears the doctor exclaim, “Oh boy, We have a pumper!” just as he feels warm blood and puss now pouring all over his back. The nurse’s face, which was the only thing he could see, went from a warm smile, to what he termed as, pure and unadulterated fear, as the doctor is screaming for her to get gauze and towels. The doctor climbed up and laid on his back to apply pressure for about 10 minutes until the bleeding stopped. So yea.. I’m hoping I never get one of those. Source
Don’t Do Surgery On The Cheap.
Veterinarian here. This happened in my 4th year of vet school. I watched a bull stomp his own intestines. A very valuable bull had an obstruction in his intestines that needed to be removed. People will only put the amount of money a food animal is worth into surgery to fix it so we had to do this on the cheap. Full anesthesia on an animal that big is crazy expensive so we did a “standing” surgery. What that means is the bull is put in a chute, numbed up really well, and other than light sedation they are totally awake and standing for surgery. So the surgeons make a 2-3 foot vertical incision in his right flank and start pulling out armfulls of intestines and handing them to me and the other vet student assistants. There’s a sterile drape on the bull and we’re all in full sterile gowns. The obstruction was pretty bad so they had to remove a couple feet of damaged intestines and then sew the ends back together. There is a lot of blood. A lot. The bull is starting to get stressed, impatient, and weak from blood loss. It starts kicking at the chute and trying to move. It gets more sedatives and the surgeons try to sew faster. Everyone is sweating and there’s a lot of swearing going on. The puddle of blood at our feet is getting bigger. The bull does a side shuffle and the intestines being held by another student are trapped between the bulls ribs and the metal bars of the chute. This is bad – even a few seconds of this can do permanent damage. The bull is too heavy to just shove over so they remove one of the side rails of the chute to free the intestines. The bull is getting really pissed off and now is trying to lunge from side to side and we are ordered to let go of the intestines we are holding to keep the bull from breaking our arms against the rails of the chute.The bull is really freaking out and manages to get partially and then completely out of the chute and starts running around the room mooing and stomping and ripping huge chunks of intestines out of itself. Blood and guts are EVERYWHERE. GALLONS of blood. Keep in mind this room is in a barn and while the area around the chute was clean the rest of the room is covered in hay and dirt. Some huge guys manage to subdue the bull and wrestle it to the ground and they give it more sedatives and pain meds. My job was to sit on his shoulder, another bigger student is sitting on his head. Everything is a complete fucking fiasco at this point and I just felt so terrible for the poor bull who was bellowing non-stop. They wash off his mangled intestines as best as they can, stitch the ends together, dump a shit ton of penicillin in his abdomen and close him up.The bull survived surgery and then was hospitalized and got tons of IV antibiotics and fluids and care. Every day his temperature got higher until he finally died a week later from a massive infection in his abdomen. So that was awful. I have absolutely no idea what they told the owner. As far as I know no one got sued. Source
Well, That’s Reassuring.
Worked in an OR for a couple years as a biomedical engineer. Sprinted to the room when equipment wasn’t working right or (more often) the surgeon or anesthesiologist didn’t know how to use the equipment (this happens SO much). With about 70 OR’s this was a fun day. 1.) A surgical table was malfunctioning going into full trendelburg (table tilts to a serious angle…) was tilting on its own and patient was sliding off the table the whole surgical team was holding on to the patient as I run in.. The fix was I slammed the controller against the floor a few times. Patient was ok, but blood everywhere… 2.) A resident was putting in a trochar and mis-placed it, sliced open the AORTA…12 hours of surgery to repair, she was going in for a simple procedure. 3.) Surgical robot froze in a case, had to reboot. But the arm was grasping a main blood vessel. So we didn’t want to reboot for fear the arms would re-home and let go of the vessel. Also, we lost video when it froze so we couldn’t just retract the instruments. Lots of people saying oh shit oh shit… I am the one pushing the power switch so if it tears out someones organs they all look at me.. 4.) Brain surgery, microscope video feed crashed, I was trying different video connections to get the overhead monitors back up, but everytime i accidentally hit the scope with my hand causing vibrations that were pretty magnified while working in the brain… He told me to never mind and to get the fuck out… This was my first day so its ok… Many many more… OR’s are a scary place, but fun and exciting job for sure. Rewarding to save the day while a team of surgeons/nurses/PA’s all thanking you profusely! Source
Yup, NOPE.
Patient here, but I have a good “oh s” surgery story. When I was 18 I was told to get my impacted wisdom teeth removed. I went to a surgeon who informed me that they were pretty much formed and I would be put on general anesthetic (totally asleep) and the teeth would be broken up to be removed. Day of surgery, I go in. Because of how fed up you get on anesthetic, my mother was scheduled to pick me up after a couple of hours. She arrived and was informed that I was still in surgery. After nearly another two hours of waiting, she felt like something wasn’t right and called my father. He came in and was likewise informed I was still in surgery. At some point they finally said they wanted to see me and threatened to call the cops. It was then revealed that my jaw had been broken. Instead of breaking up my wisdom teeth, the surgeon had tried to take them out in one piece, and on the very first tooth, he snapped my mandible. It popped up into the muscles in the back part of my cheek, coming up against two nerves. (Trigeminal and facial.) He wired it shut in a panic, without consent or an X-ray. Turns out the reason you take an x-ray is because you need to make sure the bone is set. My bone was not set. Over the course of the next two weeks, the bone didn’t heal because it wasn’t set correctly, and instead it slowly sawed through my trigeminal nerve, destroying sensation in the lower right half of my face. I looked like a stroke victim because I had very little control over it. (It’s since gotten better and moves more or less with the rest of my face but I don’t have as much control there as I should and sometimes I bite it and do a lot of damage since I can’t feel it.) This was probably the most pain I’ve ever been in in my entire life; I took liquid vicodin (remember, jaw wired shut!) every 2 hours, could barely sleep, and needed help with tasks like walking up stairs and going to the bathroom because of the pain and the drugs. It was hell on earth. We eventually found a doctor to fix it; he had to re-set the bone. This was about a 6 hour surgery and a 2-night hospital stay. The bone was so badly out of whack that it needed a plate and seven screws installed to stabilize it. My jaw was wired another 10 weeks while that healed and of course the nerve damage is permanent. You can definitely tell which side was busted, from both the surgery scar and the lop-sided smile. The original doctor who broke it refused to admit responsibility or pay any of the damages (presumably he was told by malpractice lawyers never to admit to f_*_ing up) so I sued for that; in the deposition he said he broke up the tooth, which of course he hadn’t. I had the tooth to prove he was lying, after which we settled for the amount of damage. But about 75% of it ended up going to things like lawyer fees so I still came out behind on all that. But I have a wicked scar on my neck from the surgery and my other three wisdom teeth (two of which cut through! yay!), so I got that goin’ for me, which is nice. Source
Not What You Want To Hear The Surgeon Say.
Mine is extremely rare (as I was the patient, but awake for the surgery) I was supposed to have a bump on my back removed. Nothing huge, just a lump of some kind. For insurance reasons they did it as an ambulatory in the OR of a hospital instead of the surgeon’s actual office. So, I’m wide awake, face down in the OR. I had picked him as my surgeon because his main practice was plastic surgery. At the time I lifted weights a lot and spent a lot of time working my back. I wanted as small a scar as possible. I was vain. He begins with the first incision… then goes for a second, larger… then goes deeper (I guess) and realizes the “bump” is just the extruding tip of a cyst that cut through my back to the back of my lungs. He wasn’t used to operating on alert patients… as soon as he realizes he just says, “OH F*” That was the beginning of a 4hr surgery for which I was awake. What they cut out of me was the size of an adult fist. In closing the wound they drew in so much flesh (for lack of a better word because of my lack of medical understanding) that my right arm became essentially inflexible. I couldn’t lift weights for years. All that precious work shot down the drain. What an a$$hole I was. Source
Never Underestimate The Tech.
Yeah, this really happened to me when I was in training to be a cardiologist. I was in my 2nd or 3rd heart procedure/catherization when my senior doctor got sick, ripped off his surgical gown and ran out of the room. The doctor had just yelled “Oh , no!” and left. I had just positioned these catheters with wires into the sleeping patient’s heart. They were just hanging out there pulsating to his heart beat. Apparently, the doctor had gotten food poisioning and made a run for the bathroom…never to return. So I’ve never made it to this point in the procedure before and am just wondering where to take it from here. I haven’t even been taught how to take them out safely. I’m looking at the vitals and monitors like F#@%, what do I do now? Of course they page my senior cardiology fellow in training who is taking a nap and not returning any pages or calls. No other doctors around. Finally, thank GOD, my tech/assistant who has done these procedures since before I was born gives me a nudge to flush the catheters, which I do, to prevent blood clots and death essentially. And after a few minutes properly removes the catheters and wires. They get treated like shit but have saved ALL of the fellows in training and senior doctors many, many times in complicated situations with their knowledge. Source
THAT’S The Question You Want Answered?
I was rounding a few months back and a guy gets wheeled into ICU smelling terrible. I walked over, and the dude had maybe the most macerated legs I have ever seen. There were things moving on the bed, and the suction container was full of maggots. Turns out dude had been weaving on the road, and when police pulled him over and opened the doors, maggots fell onto the road. He got taken to the ER, arrested, taken up to ICU and very rapidly debrided, then bilateral above-knee amputated. He actually made it out of the hospital, but I cannot imagine waking up one day and having no legs. I really wish I knew where he was driving, though …Source
The Ulimate Eff Up.
Did not attend but the OR nurse who told me I trust with my life. Note: heavily edited for HIPAA, but the gist is true: Surgeon needs to remove nonfunctional half of an organ. Opens up pt, looks at connecting tubes and sees what he needs to do. Clamps off healthy half from vital tubing (he needed to test area of failing organ), looks at it and goes into autopilot mode-cuts off the healthy half from vital supply tube. Everyone shits themselves and watches pt die in 20 secs. EDIT Pt didn’t bleed out, but the damage was irreparable. They had to stand there and watch the pt die. There was no way to fix it. I’m sorry I’m so vague but I’m worried about HIPAA. The surgeon clamped off the healthy part to test how much of the diseased half was operating. When the clamp was on, instead of testing, he cut behind the clamp as if it was the bad half. He basically jumped forward 10 minutes in the operation. Surgeon retains privileges at other area hospitals…Source
Nurse To The Rescue!
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. Source