A surgeon from the American state of Florida removed a patient’s liver instead of his spleen. About this writes The State. This was his third such mistake – and it may be the end of his medical career.
The image is used for illustration purposes only. Photo: Olga Kononenko, Unsplash
Thomas Schaknowski had his license suspended after he accidentally cut out patient William Bryan‘s healthy liver instead of his diseased spleen in August. According to the doctor’s colleagues, after completing the operation, he put the liver on the table and announced that he had successfully removed the spleen. The patient began to bleed heavily right on the operating table, and they could not save him.
It turned out that Shacknovsky made a mistake in this way for the third time. In May 2023, a doctor mistakenly removed part of a patient’s pancreas instead of his adrenal gland. In July of that year, Schaknowski was scheduled to perform an ileostomy on the woman, which is the creation of a stoma in the abdominal area to remove stool. However, he mixed up the operations and performed a bowel resection on the patient, which led to bowel perforation. Her condition worsened and she died soon after.
A complaint was filed against Schaknowski, alleging that he “demonstrated an inability to practice medicine with reasonable skill and safety due to his lack of basic medical knowledge in his treatment.” It is currently unable to operate in the states of Florida and Alabama. The lawyer for the family of the deceased William Bryan, Joe Zarzaur, said that he took on this case because he had previously had another patient, Shacknowski, who began having intestinal problems after surgery – the doctor threatened him, forbidding him from contacting a lawyer.
Let us remind you that similar cases occurred in Belarus. In 2023, we wrote about a resident of Lepel who won a lawsuit against an oncologist surgeon who removed a healthy kidney from a man instead of a sick one.
