An 86-year-old man has died three weeks after a surgeon operated on the wrong side of his head, and state health authorities were investigating whether the mistake contributed to his death.
The patient, whose name wasn't released, died Saturday. The state medical examiner was determining the cause of death, according to a spokeswoman for the state health department.
The man underwent emergency surgery at Rhode Island Hospital on July 30 to treat bleeding in his brain, according to a state report released Thursday.
There's really no excuse for not having consulted the CT scan before starting the case. Still, it can be quite easy in the "heat of battle" to proceed on the wrong side. I remember as a first year resident on call, the OR called me at around 5 am as they were getting ready to prep the patient for surgery that day, and he was an early case. The patient was going for a combined carotid/CABG operation, but they didn't have consent for the carotid portion. When I asked which side I should consent them for, the patient didn't know, but the nurse insisted on the right carotid. I looked in the chart, and the nurse assumed that because the right side was 100% blocked, that was the surgical side. Wrong! She didn't realize that once a carotid is occluded, it can't be operated on, and it was really the left side, which was 70% occluded. Now that it was becoming an issue, I called the attending vascular surgeon at home, and confirmed with them which side was the operative one, as by the time they arrived, the patient would be under anesthesia, and draped with the surgical side of the neck exposed. While I hope that the surgeon would have known which was the correct side, I can easily envision things proceeding less than perfectly. Thankfully, this is my only surgical side story, and it was a save.
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