40 Stories of Hospital Fiascos That Prove Things Go Wrong Far Too Often

There are a lot of human body parts you could accidentally damage while conducting an operation, but few parts are as important as the heart. You damage that on accident, and you’re in for a very bad day — or maybe just a 12-hour operation that was only supposed to be a few minutes.

In a surgery where you must remove body parts from a patient, it pays to have very steady hands that aren’t going to drop those parts on the ground. Butterfingers are the last thing you need. We’re not sure what this patient’s carpal needed to be used for, but having it dropped on the ground probably didn’t help.

In fact, we’re not sure what you do with one of those dropped body parts. Can they be sterilized? Is it a lost cause? Do they just have to throw it away and apologize to the patient? Who really knows?

The operating room is generally where you want no mistakes to happen at all, but unfortunately, that’s rarely the case. Sometimes, you accidentally nick an artery — and other times, you accidentally drop an excised brain tumor on the ground.

We suppose a tumor is far better to drop on the ground than something that needs to go back inside of the patient, but even so, it would be better for nothing to be dropped, and we can understand why the guy in charge would remove the offender from the situation.

We should be able to have complete faith in doctors, but unfortunately, they’re just human. That said, some of their mistakes seem a little too unforgivable. This doctor apparently couldn’t even rightly identify what he was supposed to be cut during a vasectomy.

Capable of errors doctors may be, but they certainly shouldn’t need a nurse to correct them on a vital aspect of major surgery. Was that guy just missing his glasses or losing his marbles? Either one is concerning.

If there’s one thing that would be utterly terrifying for a surgeon, it would be a patient shooting awake in the middle of a surgery. If they happen to scream while doing that, all the worse. This is why one needs to apply the proper amount of anesthesia to a patient.

But, it’s not easy to do that properly every single time. We’re actually curious as to how things went after this part of the surgery, where things apparently went quite wrong.

We’re starting off soft because many of these stories will be troubling. This one, on the other hand, is less about a hospital fiasco and more about a surgeon not realizing how he was being used by his boss to facilitate a goal he didn’t agree with.

Contrary to popular belief, the hospital is actually quite a cutthroat place, as far as professionalism and careers are concerned. Even if you do your job fairly well, that’s not always enough. But considering some of the mistakes you’ll see on this list, maybe it makes sense to get rid of residents who are just “decent.”

Make no mistake, honest accidents happen in hospitals. But, at the same time, some medical staff are just too high and mighty and feel that they should do things the way they want instead of the way it was planned. Who needs to break up the impacted wisdom teeth anyway, right? Just pull them right out!

And of course, when this horrible idea backfired and caused massive damage, this medical buffoon was more concerned with trying to cover his own butt than taking responsibility for what he had done, creating permanent problems for the patient. Thankfully, most medical staff aren’t this bad.

Being a medical intern is always an adventure because you never know what kind of crazy nonsense you’re going to see. Moreover, who’s allowed to be a medical intern in high school? Either way, this poor soul had apparently not been informed of how messy a C-section is. Oops.

Well, at least they were only subjected to some mildly disturbing viscera, instead of actually being the root of any harm or anything. Admittedly, it could have been a whole lot worse, like in some of these other stories.

A lack of communication or confirmation leads to a lot of hospital errors. This guy had to saw through the limb of a deceased patient, but no one told him that said limb had a metal rod that broke his saw and sent the blade flying. Definitely not desirable.

That said, there’s no better place to get injured than at a hospital, so if something had gone terribly wrong (other than the patient’s body almost igniting!), he would have been in a more fortuitous position than anywhere else.

Knocking someone out with anesthesia is an exact science, but it’s an exact science that’s hard to get right. A lot of patients actually do end up waking up on the operating table while the surgery is happening. Not every patient takes that so well.

Thankfully, this type of small mistake is relatively easy to fix, as it usually just calls for using slightly more anesthesia to put the patient back under.

Lots of hospital fiascos happen because of human error, but we would like to take a moment to acknowledge that it’s not always someone’s fault. This surgeon puts it best — sometimes, the entire hospital is absolute chaos and you can only do so much. No one can do it all.

Of course, not all mistakes are understandable and many of them are because someone is being complacent or inattentive. But having the lives of others in your hands is inherently stressful and full of mayhem, so some mistakes have some degree of justification, and some bad situations are unavoidable no matter what.

Never go into surgery expecting things to be simple, even if the problem doesn’t seem complex. This guy worked out a lot and chose a plastic surgeon to excise a weird bump on his back, because he wanted as little superficial damage to his body as possible.

Well, turns out that his little bump was actually much, much bigger than that, and it required a much more serious surgery that cost him way more skin. Everything worked out in the end, but this story drives a good point home — always be grateful when a medical scenario works out well for you.

There’s often some blood loss during surgery, but in most cases, you don’t find your patient losing an entire liter of blood in 60 seconds. Generally, that kind of thing would be the result of a mistake, but sometimes the medical situation is just that bad.

The medical staff in this story did everything right, but that didn’t stop them from having a huge medical emergency on their hands, caused by physical ailments outside of their control. With four liters of blood lost during the whole operation, it’s a miracle it all worked out.

So you have an operation coming up, and the hospital is lacking something vital. The doctor orders what he needs, but when it arrives, a nurse sends it away when everything else is set to go. In our opinion, it makes sense that the doctor would get immensely angry with said nurse.

After all, how hard would it have been to double-check with the guy in charge and ask him if he ordered this vital item? Why would you just send it away without verifying? As a nurse, how would you know what all has or hasn’t been ordered anyway?

Not really a story here, so much as a bit of hospital wisdom that can’t be denied. Giving birth is a very dangerous situation. Even when everyone does everything right, so many things can go wrong. This is true even of a C-section.

To say that the situation is tense and stressful when such complications happen is probably an understatement. But, before we judge the medical personnel too harshly, we should remember that some of them are under a ton of stress when trying to save lives.

Here’s a fine example of everyone doing their job right, but in the end, the patient still dies. Sometimes, the damage to one’s body just can’t be repaired, and certainly not as fast as it would need to be for the patient to survive.

That said, it’s unclear how this man’s sternum was broken, which led to his massive blood loss and killed him. Maybe it was CPR from the first responders? Although, we can’t really blame them for following protocol in that case.

We can’t say there’s ever a good time to get food poisoning, but of all the possibilities, in the operating room is probably the worst one — and that’s to say nothing about accidentally leaving an unqualified individual in the room alone with a live patient in a precarious situation.

Thankfully, the tech/assistant was on hand to save the day. Apparently, they do a lot more work than they really get credit for. If that assistant hadn’t been there, things could have gone seriously south for the patient, and all because of some bad food.

OK, so this is actually a veterinarian story, but hey, they’re doctors too and they have the same types of stories as doctors for human patients. For instance, this story of a male cat getting open for spaying because no one identified its gender beforehand.

Well, to be fair, it can actually be pretty hard to identify the gender of a cat sometimes. Those telltale organs aren’t as prominent as they are on other animals, and if they’re still young, they may not even be fully developed yet!

We like to think that everyone can be saved at a hospital, but that just isn’t the case. Sometimes, people die — and sometimes, a doctor has to choose who dies. These situations are rare, but they do happen.

We’re not going to argue for or against this doctor’s choice. He made a tough call in a situation where any decision would have serious ramifications. But, we should never forget that doctors occasionally have to make impossible decisions that save or cost lives.

Some people have dreams that aren’t quite as feasible as they think. For instance, if you’re the type of medical student to pass out at the sight of an injury, smash into it with your face, then cause yourself an injury that requires medical attention, you should probably consider a different career.

After all, you have to be able to handle some squeamish things if you’re going to be working in an operating room, where people may be afflicted by horrific injuries.

Does the idea of a needle being lost in your bloodstream make you feel very uncomfortable? Us too. That’s exactly what happened in this story, where some medical staff lost a needle in a man’s jugular but didn’t find it until it had made it down towards his shoulder.

But, at least they found it. For the life of us, it’s hard to even imagine a solid foreign object like that moving around in one’s veins, but we suppose anything is possible.

Those nifty operating tables we have these days usually work as intended, but sometimes there’s a malfunction. In this case, the table was tilting way too far to one side, which almost caused the patient to slip off!

Imagine being the IT guy or the technician who gets called into that situation — a bunch of doctors and nurses and residents having to hold up a knocked-out patient as the table almost throws them onto the floor. That’s one crazy day at the office.

All sorts of injuries are seen at the hospital, but you don’t often expect someone to have maggots coming out of their legs when they get wheeled in. Especially not someone who was driving not too long before.

This story unfortunately doesn’t tell us how any of this came about, so there’s no way to know where those maggots came from. But, we’d have to say, there aren’t many people out there with the stomach to tolerate stuff like that.

Apparently, it’s much easier to open a hospital in some areas of the world than it is others. In this Indian example, things went horribly wrong for a relatively simple procedure when an excised appendix was dropped back into the patient’s body.

The appendix is quite small, so it makes sense to us that it would be hard to find in the depths of the human body. There’s actually a lot of space in there, but most of it is filled with clutter — if you catch our drift.

Most people don’t understand just how much can actually fit inside of a human being. Pounds and pounds of organs. Foot after foot of them! So, it’s not actually that crazy, the idea of six or more people being needed to hold all of that stuff so it can be put back inside of someone.

In fact, this is probably on the tamer side of the stories that medical personnel can tell whenever they come back from work. We probably don’t know the half of it.

Of all the things that could happen to a patient on the operating table, we’re pretty sure getting set on fire is one of the most problematic. That’s not exactly something that should be happening at the hospital — never mind having your entire body set on fire.

Thankfully, someone was able to put it out before any permanent damage was done, but we can’t imagine how the explanation of that fiasco to the patient actually went. Could you sue for malpractice even if you ultimately weren’t hurt?

This might be one of the biggest hospital accidents actually on this list, since it involves a patient getting stabbed in the eye. It’s a rare screwup when you destroy a patient’s eye because of a bit of clumsiness.

But lo and behold, the patient was blind in that eye anyway, so he didn’t actually care about the injury to it. We have to say, that’s the most absurd level of luck a doctor has ever experienced.

We usually attribute mistakes to the least experienced members of a team, but never convince yourself that mistakes are impossible for anyone. Even the experienced mentor in this story made a mistake, puncturing a patient with a medical tool and ultimately costing that patient their life.

Not only did this experienced surgeon make a mistake, but it was also a very costly one. But no matter how skilled someone is, there’s always room for human error, and no one should be convinced otherwise.

It’s never good when something is mislabeled, but you really don’t want that at a hospital. If the wrong name is written down, or a decimal point is off on a report, lives could be ruined or lost. Such was the situation this time when an inaccurate report led to an unnecessary operation.

Unfortunately, even though the fault was with the inaccurate report, the doctors in charge didn’t verify it, so it’s not like they can just pass the blame off in regards to this woman who had body parts removed for cancer she didn’t have.

Cases of misidentification happen more often in the medical field than you think. It actually happens fairly often in dentistry, because they usually look at teeth more than your face. Not that it would be any comfort if they performed an operation on you that you didn’t need.

Thankfully, this dentist noticed that something was up before anything bad happened, but we wouldn’t have been surprised in the slightest if nothing had appeared amiss to him.

You’ve probably heard plenty of stories of surgeries on a limb where the surgeon accidentally did something to the wrong limb. Nowadays, the correct limb is usually marked by a Sharpie or something in order to avoid this kind of mishap.

All of that said, at least this surgeon managed to notice the mistake before he actually did anything to the wrong knee. We’ve seen many a hospital story where that realization didn’t happen until after it was over.

There are many things at the hospital that shouldn’t be thrown in the trash, but an organ marked for donation is definitely one of the top contenders for that list. We can’t imagine how they broke the news to the person that was supposed to receive that organ.

Maybe it was an organ that wasn’t as hard to get as some others, but even if that is the case, we can’t see anyone being particularly enthralled that they lost their transplant over a stupid mistake.

This may be the third tale or so of someone dropping an important body part on the ground during surgery, but you really can’t get much worse than dropping a piece of someone’s skull on the ground. After all, that has to be in contact with a very vulnerable thing called the brain.

It’s no surprise that the patient in question ended up getting a terrible affliction with a dirtied skull piece touching his brain. At least the hospital had the decency to cover the medical expenses, for what that’s worth.

You ever wonder what surgeons and doctors really say when you’re unconscious on the operating table? We assumed they might tell jokes, but the things that this guy said while wrongly assuming his patient was out cold are a little alarming.

You have to wonder how often surgeons consider cutting corners because the patient isn’t awake to hear or know about it. We hope that it is quite a few, but there’s no way to know for sure.

We were fairly certain that hospitals are supposed to have break rooms for their staff, but apparently, some nurses like to hang out in a patient’s room instead and gossip bout people they don’t like. That’s actually kind of funny, if you ask us.

Of course, it’s also immensely unprofessional, and it’s definitely not something that any medical staff should be getting up to in the room of a patient.

The unfortunate reality of the human body is that we’re very frail. All it takes is an accidental knick in an organ during surgery and your life could go out the window. That’s what makes it all the worse that human error is inescapable.

This grandmother’s hip surgery ended up being a downward spiral to her demise because of one slip of the hand, one unseen cut that was never rectified. That’s actually pretty scary to think about.

Working with humans is hard, but the veterinary world has a lot of major problems too. When you think about it, they have to know the anatomy of many different species, which is impressive. But, that also means there’s a lot of room for mistakes.

We would actually like a statistical comparison between a vet and a human hospital, to see which one actually has the highest rate of errors of all types, but we’re not entirely sure we would like the results.

You don’t want any cheap equipment in the operating room — not even your eyeglasses. After all, what do you do when a cheap pair breaks on you in the middle of surgery? Apparently, you get a nurse to help you tie those glasses to your head.

We suppose that’s not actually a terrible solution when you can’t afford to take a break from what you’re doing. Must have made for one heck of a funny memory whenever they all got together.

This is a bit of a weird one since the story is from a funeral home, but it relates to a hospital — as you can imagine, funeral homes get a lot of bodies from hospitals. But usually, they don’t get anything extra. This time, they got a whole extra foot.

We assume that no one got hurt in the making of this fiasco, but it still raises some serious questions about how it all happened. Where did the foot come from? Why wasn’t it with its own body? Is this what happens to amputated limbs?

If you have to remove a cancerous part from a person’s body, it pays to actually remove it completely. If you cut it off but leave it inside of them, they’re still going to have a very serious problem on their hands.

Apparently, much of the surgery was an automated process this time. We’re not against robots in hospitals, but there’s something to be said about having a human on hand to make sure everything is going smoothly at the same time. That way nobody gets a piece of rectum sewn up inside of them.

Vomiting during surgery is the worst possible time ever to do it. This also means that they ate before they were given anesthetics. Regardless of the reason, we doubt that anyone would disagree that when this happens during surgery, this can’t be good.

Basically, what happened is that this woman had a gaping hole in her eye while vomiting. She could have risked losing her entire eye had not the surgeon acted quickly enough and replaced the cornea.

Birth is probably one of the most medically challenging problems. There is so much involved in the process, as many things can easily go wrong, putting the baby and its mother at risk.

In this case, we couldn’t but chuckle a little when we read about it. In fact, it does sound like a scene from a cartoon. What’s even more surprising is that the new parents had no idea that this isn’t how you deliver a baby.

An anesthesiologist is one of the hardest medical professions that there are. This doctor is responsible for administering the right medicines that put the patient to sleep while they are being operated on.

It is also crucial to monitor a patient’s vitals during surgery. Sometimes, however, a patient could wake up during surgery. This usually means that there were not given enough medicine or that there was something else wrong. Luckily, it all ended well in this case.

Surgical staples are commonly used to stitch up a patient after surgery. In fact, they are preferred over sutures, since they reduce healing time and reduce inflammation. However, they are also less sturdy than sutures.

This means that one wrong move could result in them opening up. In this case, when this woman sneezed, this is exactly what happened. Luckily, the nurse was there to help this poor patient from spilling their bowels.

Open surgery usually involves applying local or general anesthesia. In this case, even though this was just a very huge cyst that needed to be drained, the doctor, for some reason, didn’t bother to give the patient a local anesthetic.

Instead, they just proceeded in cutting the pimple open and letting it drain. This also resulted in the patient bleeding for good ten minutes until the doctor was finally able to stop the bleeding.

New advances in technology have enabled modern medicine to improve everyone’s life, making complex medical procedures a lot easier and accessible. However, sometimes technology fails us.

This, however, is not something you would want to experience as a medical professional or a patient for that matter. This robot just stopped working mid-surgery. The problem is that it was also responsible for preventing the patient from bleeding out. We hope it ended well.

Biomedical engineers have been an essential part of any surgical crew. Since many surgeries today rely on complex biomedical machinery, biomedical engineers are often present on-site or even during the operation itself.

However, since they are not doctors, they sometimes lack knowledge about what to do and what not to do around patients. This engineer didn’t realize that their supposedly subtle movements are transferred to the patient’s open brain. Neurosurgery is not for everyone!

One of the worst nightmares of any anesthesiologist is finding out that their patient is waking up when surgery isn’t over yet. Luckily, this wasn’t the case here. However, something not less troubling almost happened here.

Moments before the surgery was about to start, when the surgical team thought that their patient is out, they were proven wrong. Someone messed up the doses or simply didn’t bother to check that their patient was indeed out.

A patient is not supposed to wake up well until the surgery is over. In this case, however, the patient began to wake up moments before the surgery was complete. What’s worse, the patient was still intubated and covered in surgical draping.

We wouldn’t want to find ourselves in a similar position. In fact, it sounds quite nightmarish, since the patient’s first instinct is to try and breathe on their own.

A power outage that happens during surgery is a major problem. Normally, hospitals have a backup generator that kicks in when the power goes out. While all of the equipment switched to the backup relay, the suction didn’t.

This means that the patient could’ve suffocated. This is perhaps one of the most terrifying things that can happen to a surgical team. Luckily, they were able to overcome the problem by manual means.

When you are a student, you are expected to make mistakes. However, after reading this, we are not sure that this is the kind of mistake that you would want to make.

We believe that medical students shouldn’t be allowed to do anything without close supervision, especially during operations. To us, it sounds like they would have to remove another piece of skin to make up for that one.

You expect doctors to be professional when they carry out medical procedures. However, sometimes they forget their professional courtesy when speaking to patients or to patients’ families.

It seems that this was the case here. He could have just told them that it went fine and there is nothing to worry about, but he had to casually throw in the fact that he dropped part of the skull. This is definitely something he should have omitted.

This is every patient’s worst nightmare. You go in for something small, but then it turns out that you are suffering from something a lot more complicated. What was thought to be a simple cyst turned out to be fatal bleeding.

The patient was taken immediately to the OR to save their lives. We guess that sometimes it’s just bad luck. Actually, they were lucky that this was discovered during their visit to the hospital. Otherwise, this might have ended badly.

Mistaking one medical condition for the other could be fatal. This is what happened to this patient. The doctors initially thought that he was simply suffering from appendicitis, which is relatively easy to fix.

However, when he was inspected by a senior surgeon, they realized that its a lot worse. Strangulated Hernia is a life-threatening condition in which fat tissue, which pushes through a weakened part of the intestinal wall, cuts off the blood flow to the intestines.

This is quite funny. Usually, mice are used as test subjects in a variety of medical experiments or for educational purposes. We guess that the mouse knew what was coming for it and that’s why they reacted the way it did.

Well, once they have put the anesthesia on the little mouse went to sleep. Who said everything has to be gruesome about the medical world? Sometimes you get fun stories like this one.

This sounds like a scene from a sitcom. Of course, this is just a funny accident. We are sure, however, that the doctor felt really bad with themselves afterward. They didn’t mean to knock this poor nurse unconscious, but we guess that this is just a professional hazard.

Also, it’s the technician’s fault. They should have fixed those lights before the surgery. In any case, we hope it all ended well.

Let’s admit it. No one likes going to the dentist. Going through any dental procedure is just unpleasant. This story, though, truly gets into our top ten horror medical stories. Wisdom tooth extraction is a serious and complex operation.

In fact, not every dentist could pull, literally, that one off easily. We are glad it all ended, miraculously, well for everyone. When extracting a wisdom tooth one has to be extremely careful since they are operating very close to two important nerves that run through that area.

A fire in a hospital during an active surgery is the worst-case scenario. Protocol states that you can’t just drop everything and run for your life, you have to stay and finish up since you are responsible for your patient’s life.

What started as a joke about this surgeon’s experiences in Africa, clearly turned into a real-life scenario. Luckily, they were able to finish up quickly and save this patient’s life.

We were always told not to count our chickens before they have hatched. This story is a classic example of why you should always keep that in mind, no matter what you do for a living. The surgery was almost complete, and it went just fine.

However, one wrong move was all it took to put her patient in a critical condition. Luckily, this resident didn’t lose their calm and managed to put everything back in place.

There is never a dull moment in the medical world. There is always something weird or bizarre happening to the men and women who practice medicine. We wonder what happened to this kid.

We are aware that laughing gas is used to make a patient feel more relaxed, but it’s not supposed to actually make you laugh. Well, at least not to this extent! We guess that the kid was having such a great time that he just had to swallow their own wisdom tooth.