It’s the ultimate nightmare when waking up from surgery: discovering the fact that the doctors made a mistake and operated on a healthy part of the body.
This is what happened to a 55-year-old Israeli man several months ago, who discovered that surgeons at the Assuta Kalanyot Medical Center in Ashdod had operated on his right leg instead of the left.
On Thursday, Mako news site reported that the man was injured six months ago in his left knee in a work accident, without specifying his name.
He underwent an MRI exam and Assuta’s doctor recommended surgery. But when he woke up after the operation, he received what he described as “the shock of my life.”
“How could such a blunder go wrong? They had all the documents and it was clear that they had to operate on the left leg.”
He is now threatening to sue the medical center, demanding 575,000 shekels ($166,000).
“This is not a Third World country,” his lawyer, Anat Ginzburg, told Macco. “This is a case of severe medical negligence that has no place in Israel and cannot pass in silence.”
Assuta’s team acknowledged that the man immediately said the wrong leg had been operated on, but said the anesthesiologist wrote in the medical file that he had spoken with the patient before surgery and “agreed that the operation was on the right leg.”
The patient says he never received a medical document from the surgeons prior to the operation, and says he was explicitly asked by the medical team to operate on the left leg.
Assuta comments to Mako that she has received the patient’s letter and will “respond accordingly in the face of the patient’s representative”.
Assuta is a network of private hospitals and medical centers affiliated with Maccabi, one of the four health funds in Israel.
Another Assuta center, Assuta Rishon Lezion Hospital, was recently implicated in a widely publicized case of medical negligence in which the wrong embryo was implanted into a woman’s uterus.