Sunday 24 August, 2003 at 11:13AM (Nereus)  ::  permalink  ::  comments (10)

I kid you not. This was published on AOL news a week or so ago. Apparently 67-year-old Hurshell Ralls went into surgery for bladder cancer, but came out of surgery missing more than he ever expected. His penis and testicles were gone. Though shocking, he's not the first to get a traumatic surgical surprise.

Ralls, a mechanic, says doctors never warned him or his wife that amputation of the penis and testicles might have been part of surgery before he went in for the procedure in November 1999. Ralls filed a negligence lawsuit against the Clinics of North Texas in Wichita Falls and the doctors who operated on him. The civil case is set for trial Aug 25.

"It was never even discussed. And I felt like he ought to have at least told us that this might be a possibility so that we could have talked it over even before he was admitted to the hospital," said Thelma Ralls, his wife.

In a February deposition, Ralls' doctor said that he determined the cancer had spread to the penis while he was removing Ralls' bladder. Doctors did not send a tissue sample to the lab until after the surgery. A Dallas doctor who examined cell slides later found that Ralls did not in fact have penile cancer.

How bad is that? I'd be suing the shit out of them, and no amount of money would be enough to compensate. I hope the doctor is struck off the medical register at the very least. What's worse is that this is not unusual. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation reported in 2001 that 95% of doctors have witnessed a major medical mistake, and that many of them involved cancer. When Johns Hopkins reviewed tissue samples from thousands of cancer patients around the country, they found one out of every 71 cases was misdiagnosed! Ok, lets look at that in real numbers..

According to this report to the Senate Appropriations Committee in June 2002, there are 1.2million new cases of cancer diagnosed each year in the US. Note this is new cases, not reviews of existing cases that have gone into remission or spread etc, so this translates to a bare minimum of about 17,000 cancer patients misdiagnosed every year. That is absolutely disgusting. No wonder these guys need so much bloody insurance.

Frank Barerra is another cancer patient who was the victim of an error. He was actually in surgery about to have his prostate removed, when a call came from the pathology department - there had been a mistake. His slides showed no cancer.

Last January, Good Morning America interviewed Linda McDougal, who was misdiagnosed with breast cancer. McDougal was given a double mastectomy at the United Hospital of St. Paul, Minn., in May 2002. After the surgery, McDougal was told that she actually had no signs of cancer at all.

The only advice given: get a second opinion!