A medical mistake instantly killed a visiting patient in Florida. William Bryan died on the operating table when the surgeon accidentally removed the wrong organ. He thought it was the patient’s spleen but it wasn’t. He snipped something a lot more vital out instead, the man’s liver. Oops. That’s what insurance is for.
A fatal mistake
There’s no doubt at all that the surgeon’s mistake was the direct cause of death. Alabama residents William and Beverly Bryan “were visiting their rental property in Okaloosa County, Florida last month” when William “suddenly began experiencing lower left abdominal pain.” It wasn’t an appendicitis.
Dr. Thomas Shaknovsky “mistakenly removed the man’s liver during surgery.” He was totally sure he had an “enlarged spleen” in his hand when he grabbed the scissors.
Beverly has a lawyer with Zarzaur Law who explains that 70-year-old William, of Muscle Shores, Alabama, “went to Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast Hospital in Walton County, where he was admitted for further tests over concerns about an abnormality of the spleen.”
On August 21 of this year, “William Bryan died on a Florida hospital operating table when a doctor wrongfully removed his liver.” That’s a serious mistake. The surgeon isn’t the only one being sued for it.
Along with General Surgeon Dr. Thomas Shaknovsky, the hospital’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Christopher Bacani, “persuaded the reluctant family for Bryan to undergo surgery at the hospital.” They warned the couple he “could experience serious complications if he left the hospital.”
They sold William on the procedure and he signed informed consent forms allowing “a hand-assisted laparoscopic splenectomy.” They didn’t warn him they might remove the wrong organ by mistake, so they’re legally liable.
Catastrophic blood loss
Things went along normally, with Shaknovsky apparently not paying attention to his work. He was probably flirting with the nurses. In the middle of the surgery, Shaknovsky removed Bryan’s liver by transecting the major vasculature supplying the liver. That was a fatal mistake.
“The surgical cut” resulted in “immediate and catastrophic blood loss resulting in death.” A later autopsy revealed “an apparent small cyst” on his spleen “which is believed to be the cause of the pain he was hospitalized for.”
As his patient lay there bleeding out on the table Dr. Shaknovsky dropped the organ he had just removed into a standard specimen container and labeled it “spleen.”
Even after he had it out in the light where he could get a good look at it, he still didn’t recognize the organ as a liver. That kind of mistake gets you an ‘F’ in anatomy class but it costs your insurance company millions when it happens in surgery.
Before Beverly had a lawyer, Shaknovsky tried to cover his mistake by lying to her. He thought she would believe that William’s “‘spleen‘ was so diseased that it was four times bigger than usual and had migrated to the other side of (his) body.” This isn’t the first time that Dr. Shaknovsky got a little confused on organ identification.
The law firm relates the surgeon had a previous “wrong-site surgery” back in 2023 “where he supposedly removed a portion of a patient’s pancreas instead of performing the intended adrenal gland resection.” That mistake was settled under seal so doesn’t show up in record searches.
