- It wasn’t the first time the doctor messed up, but it was his first fatality.
Are you familiar with the term “never event?” It’s medical jargon used to describe events that should never, ever happen during professionally performed surgeries.
You know, things like performing surgery with filthy hands or losing your watch in the patient’s chest cavity. Or perhaps cutting out the wrong organ.
That latter “never event” is what killed Bill Bryan.
The Alabama man was vacationing in Florida, when he suddenly started feeling pain on the left side of his torso. At a hospital, Dr. Thomas Shaknovsky, suspected there was something wrong with the 70-year-old’s spleen and insisted he needed emergency surgery.
It’s unclear what exactly went down during the operation. Somehow, Shaknovsky mistook Bryan’s liver for his spleen, despite the organs being located on the opposite sides of the body and looking nothing like each other.
Operating on his mistaken identification, Shaknovsky removed Bryan’s liver. Doing so, he severed major blood vessels and left the man to bleed to death.
Bryan’s family is now evaluating their options on suing Shaknovsky for malpractice. However, even getting the doctor’s license revoked is subject to months-long bureaucratic processes—meaning it will be a long time before any possible justice is served.
Sudden Abdominal Pain
William “Bill” Bryan and his wife, Beverly, are from Muscle Shoals, Alabama. In last August, they were vacationing at a condo they own in Destin, Florida.
Suddenly, Mr. Bryan developed severe pain in his left side. He got so uncomfortable that his wife took him to Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast Hospital in Miramar Beach.
The initial diagnosis — delivered by the hospital’s general surgeon, Dr. Thomas Shaknovsky, and the chief medical officer, Dr. Christopher Bacani — suspected there was something seriously wrong with Mr. Bryan’s spleen. According to the doctors, he needed emergency surgery.
Initially, the Bryans intended to return to Alabama to have their own doctors carry out the operation. However, Shaknovsky insisted that the surgery should be performed right away in Florida.
According to Shaknovsky, Bryan’s spleen could otherwise rupture and he could bleed to death — a bit ominous foreshadowing, there.
Beverly Bryan is a nurse, so she was reluctant to have unfamiliar doctors operate on her husband. In the end, both Mr. and Mrs. Bryan relented and Bill was wheeled to the operating room.
A Botched Operation
On August 21, Dr. Shaknovsky performed a hand-assisted laparoscopic splenectomy on Bill Bryan. In other words, he meant to remove his spleen.
But that’s not what he did. Due to reasons that remain unknown for now, Shaknovsky mistook Bryan’s liver for his spleen.
In case you’re not intricately familiar with human anatomy, your spleen resides on the left side of the torso (where Bryan felt pain). The liver, on the other hand, is located mostly on the right and is much larger than the spleen.
Yet, Shaknovsky failed to realize he had identified the wrong organ, and so he cut out Bryan’s perfectly functional liver. He was so convinced that he had operated correctly that he later told Mrs. Bryan her husband’s “spleen” was so diseased, it was several times bigger than normal and had “migrated” to the right side of the chest.
You could almost think it was his liver or something.
Meanwhile, William Bryan died in the operating room from massive blood loss resulting from Shaknovsky severing the major blood vessels of his liver. Ironically, an autopsy later confirmed that Bryan had a small cyst on his spleen — which was still attached to his body.
Not His First Mistake
After Mr. Bryan’s death, his family hired Zarzaur Law to investigate the case and press potential charges against Shaknovsky. During its investigation, the law firm discovered a mind-boggling revelation.
This wasn’t the first time Dr. Shaknovsky had mistakenly operated on the wrong organ. In 2023, he mistakenly sliced off a part of another patient’s pancreas, when he was supposed to be cutting their adrenal gland.
Zarzaur Law found that this case was settled in confidence and Shaknovsky was allowed to remain a general surgeon at Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast Hospital, as reported in the Pensacola News Journal.
So, this seems like a pretty self-explanatory malpractice case, right? Shaknovsky will soon have his medical license revoked, right?
Not necessarily. According to Zarzaur Law, Florida legislation requires a six- to nine-month review process before a formal medical malpractice lawsuit can be filed.
Even after that, it could take another several months for the state’s medical board to make any kind of decision regarding Shaknovsky.
Bryan’s family is also evaluating their options to press criminal charges against the doctor. However, at the time of writing, an investigation was still underway and no charges had been filed.
It Happens All the Time
It might be tempting to believe this kind of horrendous case is extremely rare. Well, we have some bad news for you.
Despite their name, “never events” are shockingly common. In fact, they happen all the time.
A 2012 study found that, in the U.S., surgeons leave foreign objects (like surgical tools or even towels) inside the patient’s body 39 times a week. Meanwhile, they perform the wrong procedures and operate on wrong body parts 20 times a week for both mistakes.
“The events we’ve estimated are totally preventable. This study highlights that we are nowhere near where we should be and there’s a lot of work to be done,” the study leader, Dr. Marty Makary, told Science Daily.
And that was in 2012. Bill Bryan’s sad case shows things aren’t much better 12 years later.