I want to talk a little bit about the story that's been all over the headlines in the past day or two now obviously I don't have the medical records I don't know the full history but per report this surgeon removed the patient's liver during a splenectomy just a little bit of background this was a 70-year-old man who was on vacation in Florida with his wife and Destin shows up to the emergency department with some left-sided flank pain the left side is the part of the abdomen that the spleen is on so he's on vacation with a hospital system that he's never been with and doctors that he doesn't know had some CT scans and MRIs supposedly that showed an enlarged spleen and a possible malignancy and he dropped his hemoglobin from 14 to 9 that's his blood counts and the patient wanted to go to another facility back home where he is from in Alabama but the surgeons at this facility deemed that it was not safe for him to leave the hospital and he needed his spleen removed during this admission I got this information from Med page today which I believe is quotes from the Opera report and per the report the surgeon claims that a splenic artery aneurysm ruptured and there was extensive intraabdominal blood loss precluding visualization to the hilum the Patient continued to bleed and then he went into cardiac arrest the spleen reportedly was quently removed and sent to pathology and the patient later died on the table now here's the real interesting thing per multiple media Outlets the surgeon reportedly told the wife that the spleen was located on the opposite side and it was extremely enlarged and diseased and he had to remove it the spleen was removed it was sent to pathology and the pathologist identified no tissue that belonged to the spleen and however did identify a grossly unifiable liver during autopsy the spleen was still intact within the body and had a small cyst that had likely hemorrhaged or ruptured that probably caused his abdominal pain and his drop in his hemoglobin so it seems absolutely crazy that a surgeon would mistake the liver for the spleen since they're located on opposite sides of the body they're pretty distinctly different and have markedly different Anatomy this is a little different than wrong site surgery where you have two arms and instead of operating on the right arm you operate on the left arm where those features are extremely similar but you just go to the wrong side or in spine surgery sometimes it has been identified that surgeons have operated on the wrong level because they miss number it during X-rays and I can kind of comprehend how that can happen I have just got to believe that there's more to the story that can't be released because this seems really really crazy I'll be really interested to hear when more of the story comes out to see if this actually is what it's being sold as because if it is it's pretty gross negligence on the surgeon's part I really hope that we get some answers to this and more importantly that the family gets some type of resolution in this this really really bizarre story