A patient is recovering from surgery, and the doctor asks him how he’s doing. “Not bad,” says the patient. “But I’ve been feeling very thirsty.”
“That reminds me,” says the doctor. “I left my sponge somewhere, and I can’t remember where.”
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It’s a corny joke, and it’s one of those jokes that becomes less funny when you learn how true they are. Surgeons seem to leave objects inside patients all the time, and often, that object is something more dangerous than a sponge, so a sponge doesn’t make for a very cutting punchline. In fact, for this latest roundup of hospital screwups, we’re deliberately avoiding any stories of items mislaid inside patients. Instead, here are some mistakes that are even worse…
The Baby Mistakenly Sent to the Morgue
Analia Bouter gave birth at an Argentinian hospital in 2012, and doctors declared the baby to be stillborn. They took it down to the morgue, and the parents asked to see the body down there. The doctors weren’t very into this idea. It wasn’t a baby but a corpse, which had been in a refrigerated morgue drawer for 12 hours at this point, so mom and dad might as well wait till it was properly embalmed before having to deal with it. But the parents insisted.
They went down, looked in the drawer and found that the girl was moving. She was alive. Barely alive — half a day in a fridge isn’t great for any newborn, let alone one that had been born prematurely and declared dead, but she was alive, and it was off to the neonatal intensive care unit with her. Her parents named her Luz Milagros, meaning “Miracle Light.” The case became famous, and the president of the country reached out, wanting to meet the miracle baby.
Luz went home with the Bouters, and she lived to 14 months. That’s not a lot, of course, but it’s 14 months more than the hospital were willing to give her.
Locking Up a Guy for Saying He Was One of the Four Tops
Alexander Morris walked into a Michigan hospital last year, complaining of chest pains. He was having a cardiac episode, and hospital staff treated him for this. But then he told them something unusual: He was a member of the Motown group the Four Tops, so the hospital should be prepared for some attention. Fans might besiege the building, and the security staff should respond appropriately.
The hospital figured this guy was nuts, so they now tied him up in a straitjacket and ordered a psychiatric evaluation on him. That’s the standard response when a patient declares they’re Napoleon or Cleopatra, but in this case, the guy wasn’t deluded. He really was one of the Four Tops.
In the hospital’s defense, Morris clearly wasn’t from the band’s original lineup from 1965, as he was 53 years old and hadn’t even been born back then. But like most bands that go on touring for decades, the Tops ended up with a rotating lineup, and Morris was now, in fact, their lead singer.
His wife ended up showing up and supporting his story, but it took a video of him performing at the Grammys to convince the hospital he was sane. As compensation, they offered him a $25 gift card for a nearby supermarket. He might have convinced them sooner by singing for them, but a proper performance required all Four Tops, and that was 300 percent more Tops than were available.
A Hospital Charged a Patient Extra Because They Lost His Skull
We told you we weren’t going to be sharing any stories about objects lost inside the body. But here’s a little story about losing an object taken out of the body.
Fernando Cluster underwent a decompressive hemicraniectomy in 2022, which is when doctors saw off a bit of your skull to give your brain some breathing room. Once your brain’s swelling goes down, doctors are supposed to slide that bone flap back into place so it can heal and become part of your head again. But when the time came to replace Cluster’s flap, the team realized they didn’t know where it was.
They’d put it with a bunch of other bone flaps, and they couldn’t figure out which of them was his. This sounds like a matter of holding up the puzzle pieces to the hole and seeing which fit, but in the end, they never did find the missing flap. They stuck an artificial piece of bone in his skull instead.
Since they’d had to whip up their own fake flap, they had to charge him an extra $19,000, naturally, and that doesn’t count the extra they billed him for his extended stay. If they ever do find his bone flap, they promise to post it to him, so he can use it an ashtray, or perhaps a decorative candy dish.
The Patient Lost in a Stairwell
There is one thing worse that a hospital can lose besides a part of a patient: the entirety of a patient. Such as what happened one May when the town of Bedford, Massachusetts reported that a 62-year-old veteran had gone missing. A month later, he turned up at the VA hospital. Or rather, his body turned up there, because he was dead in a stairwell of the building and had been dead for an unclear length of time.
That man had originally gone missing from this very hospital, but a month later, this was the last place anyone expected to find him. Were he still in the hospital, surely someone would have found him there immediately, even if only because of the smell.
The VA claimed that they had no jurisdiction over this specific stairwell, which belonged to a separate organization. This other organization, in turn, said they were specifically forbidden from entering the stairwell at all. Authorities would have questioned both more closely, but this went down in June 2020, when people were dying all over the place, so one more dead old man didn’t seem like worth investigating.
One Doctor Couldn’t Hear the Screams Because He Forgot His Hearing Aide
A colonoscopy, you might know, is nowhere as terrifying or painful as people fear. The procedure is a useful way of spotting colorectal issues before they can become cancerous and kill you, so it’s well worth any discomfort. But have you considered the additional risk you may suffer if this colonoscopy takes place in Florida?
Such was the situation facing a patient of Florida doctor Ishwari Prasad. The doctor failed to properly sedate the patient, so the colonoscopy wound up a lot more painful than it should have been. As the emergency order later banning Prasad from practicing medicine put it, “Dr. Prasad continued to insert the scope despite being told to wait and began to thrust the scope into (the patient’s) rectum while (the patient) shouted in pain. (The patient) began to yell and shouted that he was in pain and could still feel everything. Dr. Prasad continued to move the scope while (the patient) continued to scream.”
Prasad was not a sadist (that we know of). He kept going because he was deaf, and he’d neglected to put in his hearing aids during the operation.
The Board of Medicine put Prasad on probation. We can’t imagine this news provided much comfort to the patient, as any word beginning with “probe” now gives him PTSD.
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