The widow of a septuagenarian who died two weeks ago after having the wrong organ removed during an operation has taken legal action to prevent the surgeon from performing the operation again, even though it is believed to be his second similar mistake.
“My husband died while helpless on Dr. (Thomas) Shaknovsky’s operating table. I don’t want anyone else to die because of his incompetence at a hospital that should have known or did know he had already made drastic surgical errors,” Beverly Bryan said in a statement from the law firm Zarzaur Law, according to the New York Post on Wednesday.
Just two weeks ago, the Alabama woman and her husband, William Bryan, were traveling to Florida to view their rental property in Okaloosa County when the 70-year-old reportedly began experiencing abdominal pain.
At Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast Hospital, doctors reportedly discovered an abnormality in his spleen, telling him he needed to undergo emergency surgery or risk “serious complications if he left the hospital,” according to the American media.
Except that once on the operating table on August 21, the surgeon allegedly mixed the patient’s spleen with his liver, severing the main vascular system that supplies the organ and causing “immediate and catastrophic blood loss leading to death,” the law firm continued.
Yet the spleen is usually located in the upper right corner of the abdominal cavity and is about the size of a fist, unlike the liver, which is located in the upper left corner and can weigh 1,100 to 1,400 grams more, according to the Post.
In front of the widow, Dr. Shaknovsky then allegedly explained that her husband’s spleen was “so diseased that it was four times the normal size and had migrated to the other side of his body,” the widow alleged.
It was only after William Bryan’s death that the removed organ, labeled a spleen, was finally identified as his liver.
But according to the law firm, this was not the surgeon’s first surgical error, as in 2023 he allegedly removed part of a patient’s pancreas instead of performing the planned resection of his adrenal gland, located on the kidneys.
For the patient’s widow, it is clear that the surgeon should no longer practice. She intends to obtain justice for her husband on both the civil and criminal levels.
For its part, the hospital reportedly said it was investigating the patient’s death and had “disassociated itself” from the surgeon, according to Zarzaur Law.
