I was going through pre-operative tests and meetings yesterday and during one interview the nurse looks at me and says … “So, we’ll be operating on your left side.” NO! Now I’ll admit my surgery is minor (Salivary gland issues). So if they operated on the wrong side I wouldn’t be life altering disfiguration but I would have been upset/freaked. I now want to show up at the hospital with not this side scrawled across the left side of my face.
I mean honestly you hear about people getting the wrong body part removed/amputated and think how could it happen?
Well for my little mistake it was apparently a transcription error which can happen easily enough, and what if I was a bit more worried about the surgery and wasn’t focusing on what the nurse had said (I would be fairly distracted if I was about to have a limb removed). If I hadn’t spoken up would it have been caught?
Now, when I saw my doctor later that day his first question to me was … “Now what side are you having problems with? … That’s what I thought.”
Did he look at the records and realize there was a mistake or did the hospital contact him about the error. It just goes to show no matter what you have to pay attention when having medical procedures.
My favorite part was when the nurse asked me if I was sure they had the wrong side….
