Monstrous Medical Mistakes

Imagine checking into a hospital for a routine tonsillectomy and waking up with one of your kidneys missing. No, this isn’t the plot of a new horror movie, it’s just another day in the crazy world of real-life medical errors.

Medical mistakes are no small slip-up. In fact, according to a Johns Hopkins study, they're the third leading cause of death in the United States, after heart disease and cancer. Estimates suggest that 250,000 to 440,000 US citizens die every year from preventable errors in healthcare. And for those who survive? Some walk out with surgical tools still inside them, the wrong limb amputated, or even memories of waking up in a morgue. Surgical items like sponges are left inside patients roughly 1,500 times a year, that’s four times a day!

I will deep dive into the world’s most jaw-dropping, and legally horrifying medical mistakes. This article is case-study heavy, filled with what we call ‘never events’. That is the official term for medical errors that are so serious and so preventable they should literally never happen. And yet… they do. Spoiler: they happen more than you think.

Let’s scrub in.

You’d think ‘left or right?’ would be the sort of thing double-checked before surgery. And yet, the US sees an estimated 40 to 60 wrong-site surgeries every single week. Imagine that on a global scale.

Take Willie King, a diabetic patient at University Community Hospital in Florida. In 1995, he was prepped for an amputation of a gangrenous leg. The operation went smoothly. Right about until someone realized they had amputated the wrong leg. Yes. The healthy one. King eventually received a $900,000 settlement and became a grim milestone in the history of medical malpractice.

Then there’s Rhode Island Hospital, where surgeons in 2007 operated on the wrong side of a patient’s brain not once, not twice, but three separate times in a single year. One of the patients died. The hospital was fined and subjected to intensive oversight, though no amount of paperwork could stitch back what was lost.

At this point, the public questions, what do they teach in medical school?

One of the most common ‘never events’ is the retention of surgical instruments inside patients. Up to 1 in every 5,500 surgeries results in a retained object. Yes, they close and sew people up with stuff still inside them. Most common are sponges, sometimes discovered years later when a patient complains of ‘weird stomach cramps’.

Consider the unnamed woman in the UK who spent six years suffering from abdominal pain after a routine operation. Eventually, doctors discovered a surgical sponge had been left inside her, and over time, it had fused into her intestines. Emergency surgery saved her, but barely.

Then there’s Ma Van Nhat, a Vietnamese man who complained of mysterious stomach pains, for 18 years straight. In 2017, doctors finally discovered the culprit: a 30-centimeter pair of forceps left behind during an operation in 1998. The man had been carrying them like a metallic parasite for nearly two decades. Did TSA ever ask why he was carrying surgical hardware internally?

And now for the showstopper: Dirk Schroeder, a German retiree who underwent prostate surgery in 2009. After the operation, he complained of severe pain. Doctors dismissed him, saying it was normal to feel moderate discomfort during recovery. However, his pain wasn’t tolerable and not until follow-up procedures, did the doctors reveal that 16 surgical objects had been left inside his body, including a needle, a six-inch roll of bandage, a swab, and several broken pieces of equipment. It took two additional surgeries to remove them all.

Hospitals often complain about equipment shortages, maybe that’s because half of them are still inside patients.

Roughly 1.5 million people in the US are harmed each year due to medication errors. Some of these mistakes are so bizarre you’d think I made them up for dramatic effect.

Let’s start with RaDonda Vaught, a nurse at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. In 2017, she was tasked with administering Versed, a mild sedative, to an elderly patient. Instead, she pulled Vecuronium, a paralytic agent, from an automated dispensing cabinet. The patient, Charlene Murphey, was left brain-dead and died shortly after. Vaught was eventually convicted of criminally negligent homicide igniting a global debate about accountability in medicine.

Swiftly shifting from this tragedy to complete absurdness. In 2012, Ilda Vitor Maciel, an 88-year-old woman hospitalized in Rio de Janeiro after suffering a stroke, was accidentally injected with chicken soup into her veins instead of into her feeding tube. The nurse, reportedly named Ana, mistakenly administered the soup intravenously. Maciel died shortly after the incident, and her family filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against the hospital.

In a case, which sounds like a textbook medical miscalculation, a 9-month-old girl at Children's National Medical Center in Washington DC, died in 2001 after a nurse administered a massive overdose of morphine due to a misplaced decimal point. The intended dose was 0.5 mg, but the infant received 5 mg, ten times the appropriate amount. Due to some miracle, the baby survived.

This is why medical students are taught ‘never trust your gut, trust the dosage sheet’.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that medication errors cost approximately $42 billion USD annually, representing 1% of total global health expenditure. This substantial financial burden highlights the widespread impact of medication errors worldwide. Recognizing this, WHO launched the ‘Medication Without Harm’ initiative in 2017, aiming to reduce severe, avoidable, medication-related harm by 50% globally over five years.

Scalpel, Check. Anaesthesia, Check. Sanity? Missing..

Checklists save lives. Ego kills. Humility is the best medicine.

Surgery is already a stressful experience. Now imagine the operating table bursting into flames mid-procedure.

In one reported case, a 33-year-old pregnant woman underwent an elective Caesarean section under spinal anaesthesia. During the procedure, the surgical site caught fire due to the use of an alcohol-based antiseptic and electrocautery equipment. The fire resulted in 17% second-degree superficial partial-thickness burns, leading to circulatory shock. Fortunately, both mother and newborn were discharged without further complications.

Similar incidents have been reported across the US and UK. In one particularly gruesome case, a man suffered third-degree facial burns during a simple facial mole removal. The cause? An oxygen-rich environment combined with flammable prep-agents and electrocautery tools.

Misdiagnosis affects hundreds of millions of people globally each year, and one in three of those cases result in serious harm or death.

In 2020, Kayleigh Colegate, a 33-year-old mother of two from Shropshire, UK, visited the hospital multiple times complaining of shortness of breath, dizziness, and chest pain. She was repeatedly told it was a chest infection. In reality, it was a pulmonary embolism, and she died before receiving proper treatment.

In the US, a woman suffering chest pain was told it was just indigestion. She was given antacids and sent home. Hours later, she died of a heart attack.

Turns out Google might’ve done a better job, though it always thinks you have cancer. And as a chronic ‘Google-er’, I can vouch, I’ve misdiagnosed myself with terminal illnesses plenty a time. My advice is, see a trained professional, they have a lesser chance of getting it wrong.

There’s something especially terrifying about being declared dead when you’re still alive. I know, that’s a horror movie plot that would haunt my nightmares as a kid.

In July 2010, Maria de Jesus Arroyo, an 80-year-old grandmother from Los Angeles, was pronounced dead after suffering a heart attack. She was then routinely placed in the morgue freezer at White Memorial Medical Center. Days later, morticians found her body face down with a broken nose and facial lacerations. A pathologist concluded that she had been alive when placed in the freezer and died from asphyxiation and hypothermia while trying to escape.

Even more surreal, in 2014, Janina Kolkiewicz, a 91-year-old woman in Poland, was declared dead and likewise placed in a morgue freezer. Eleven hours later, staff noticed movement in her body bag. Upon rushing to get her out, she was determined to be alive and well, with no lasting health issues. I imagine she walked out of the morgue physically fine, but emotionally shaken for the rest of her life.

You know healthcare’s in trouble when the patients must call for their own resuscitation.

Some mistakes aren’t just about a single doctor or nurse, they’re due to institutional errors, when the entire system fails.

Between 2005 and 2009, Stafford Hospital in England saw as many as 1,200 unnecessary patient deaths, due to neglect, staffing shortages and systemic dysfunction. This complete collapse in patient care standards created what would become known as the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust scandal. It led to a public inquiry and major reforms in NHS safety regulations. The phrase ‘careless killing’ was used in the media, in association to this case.

In a separate case, Dani Marie Schofield, a nurse at Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center in Medford, Oregon, was accused of replacing patients' prescribed fentanyl with tap water in intravenous drips. This led to bacterial infections and at least one death. She caused mass under-medication of post-op patients for weeks before being caught. The hospital faced multiple lawsuits totalling over $477 million.

In these rigged systems, even good doctors get drowned in bad policy.

Medical mistakes are not just human errors; they are often systemic failures. From checklists to culture, every part of the healthcare system plays a role in patient safety. What I’ve discussed here are the worst-case scenarios, the stuff that turns a routine check-up into a Netflix series. But they also serve as a chilling reminder that in healthcare, attention to detail is everything. ‘Never-events’ mustn’t happen. The stakes are too high.

If you didn’t trust hospitals before, you’ve now got the receipts, but as horrifying as these mistakes are, they are the exception, not the rule. The vast majority of doctors and nurses are incredibly competent, compassionate, and cope well under the enormous pressure of the consequences behind their actions. Modern medicine saves far more lives than it harms, and thanks to improved safety protocols, electronic systems, and transparency, errors like these are becoming increasingly rare. So keep the faith, just maybe double-check that consent form.