1,001 Facts That Will Scare the S#*t Out of You: The Ultimate Bathroom Reader (87 page)

657

FACT :
A leading cause of
drug-related errors is name confusion
. For example, the arthritis drug Celebrex is often confused with the anticonvulsant Cerebyx and the antidepressant Celexa. Prescribing the wrong drug based on name confusion can be fatal.
So if you or someone you know takes the prescription drugs Nyacide or Larsenic, you might want to double check your medicine before taking it.

Tamar Nordenberg, “Make No Mistake: Medical Errors Can Be Deadly Serious,” FDA Consumer, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, September-October 2000,
www.fda.gov
.

658

FACT :
A seventeen-year-old girl named Jésica Santillán died in 2003 after she received a heart and lung transplant from
a patient whose blood type was not a match
. Doctors at the Duke University Medical Center did not check compatibility, and transplanted organs from a type-A donor to Santillán, whose blood was type-O.
“On the bright side,” said one Duke official, “she wasn’t on the basketball team.”

Carol Kopp, “Anatomy Of A Mistake,” 60 Minutes,
CBSNews.com
, September 7, 2003,
www.cbsnews.com
.

Tom Baker, The Medical Malpractice Myth (University of Chicago Press, 2007), 4.

659

FACT :
Doctors from Rhode Island Hospital in Providence performed
brain surgery on the incorrect side of three patients’ heads
in 2007. Two of the mistakes caused no serious damage, but one led to the patient’s death. The hospital paid $50,000 in fines and faced reprimand by the state Department of Health.
Okay then, as long as they were reprimanded.

Associated Press, “Third Wrong-Sided Brain Surgery at R.I. Hospital,”
MSNBC.com
, November 27, 2007,
www.msnbc.msn.com
.

660

FACT :
In 2006,
surgeons at a Los Angeles V.A. hospital removed the healthy right testicle
of a forty-seven-year-old man by mistake. There were several botched steps leading to the surgery which resulted in the error, including a mistake on the consent form and forgetting to mark the surgical site before the procedure.
That’s just nuts.

Julia Hallisy, The Empowered Patient: Hundreds of Life-Saving Facts, Action Steps and Strategies You Need to Know (The Empowered Patient, 2007), 119.

“SoCal Vet Claims Wrong Testicle Removed In Surgery,”
CBS5.com
, April 5, 2007,
www.cbs5.com
.

661

FACT :
A Tampa, Florida
surgeon removed the incorrect leg
of a fifty-two-year-old patient by mistake during amputation in 1995. The team realized their error mid-procedure, but too late in the process to save the leg.
Wanna get away?

“Florida Hospital Surgeons Mistakenly Amputate Wrong Leg of Patient,” Jet, March 20, 1995,
www.findarticles.com
.

Robert M. Wachter, Understanding Patient Safety (McGraw-Hill Professional, 2007), 58.

662

FACT :
In a 2002 case, a woman was admitted to a teaching hospital for a cerebral angiography procedure. After, the hospital transferred her to another floor. The next morning she was
mistakenly taken in for open-heart surgery
.
“Students, today we’re going to learn about malpractice suits.”

Robert M. Wachter, Lee Goldman, and Harry Hollander, Hospital Medicine, 2nd ed. (Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2005), 152.

Mark R. Chassin and Elise C. Becher, “The Wrong Patient,” Annals of Internal Medicine, June 4, 2002, 826–833,
www.annals.org
.