A shame-faced surgeon faced manslaughter charges before a court in Germany on Tuesday for removing a healthy lung instead of a cancer-riddled one from a patient who later died as a result of the blunder.
The 55-year-old doctor told the court in Kassel he had not noticed the error until after the healthy organ was removed.
”I can’t explain how it happened,” he told the court. ”I had it in my mind that we were removing the right lung. I even looked at the X-ray of the diseased left lung and it still didn’t register,”
he said.
”And when I held the healthy right lung in my hand I could tell it was fine and had no tumour. But by then it was too late.”
No one else in the operating theatre noticed the error, although one assisting physician recalled briefly wondering why the X-ray showed a left lung while the surgeons were cutting into the right
one. He told the court he had assumed they knew what they were doing.
The surgeon was assigned to the case on short notice when the patient’s personal surgeon was unable to attend.
The 52-year-old patient died several weeks after the October 1999 operation when the tumour spread through the remainder of the diseased lung as doctors looked on helplessly.
In the wake of the blunder, the hospital alerted prosecutors and paid out an undisclosed sum to the patient’s survivors. – Sapa-DPA