A Florida surgeon accused of removing a 70 year-old patient’s liver instead of their spleen says he is “forever traumatised” after the man’s death.
Dr Thomas Shaknovsky was indicted on a charge of second-degree manslaughter in April, almost two years after the William Bryan died on the operating table in August 2024, the Walton County Sheriff’s Office said.
Shaknovsky pleaded not guilty to the charge. In a November deposition, he offered a detailed account of the events that led to the death of the Navy veteran at Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast hospital.
“That was an incredibly unfortunate event that I regret deeply, and I’m forever traumatized by it and hurt by it,” he said in a transcript obtained by NBC News.
The network was given the transcript by attorney Joe Zarzaur, who represents Beverly Bryan, the patient’s widow.
The surgery had been scheduled to be a laparoscopic splenectomy, according to the WCSO.
During his deposition, Shaknovsky said that his view of the patient’s organs had been obstructed by an enlarged colon. There was also blood in Bryan’s abdomen.
Shaknovsky said that Bryan started bleeding profusely during the operation, causing his heart to stop.
As the operating room team began chest compressions, Shaknovsky says that he tried to identify the source of the bleeding.
“It was like a overflown sink that’s clogged up, and I am looking for a fork at the bottom, trying to feel and find the bleed, and I was not able to do so,” he said, per NBC.
“After 20 minutes of struggling, desperately trying to save his life, that’s when the wrong-site event took place.”
After the liver was removed, the surgeon asked a nurse to label the organ as a spleen, NBC reported. The surgeon said during the deposition that he had expected the spleen to be double its normal size, because it had a mass on it.
After Bryan’s death, Shaknovsky said he went to the hospital’s medical library to cry.
“I can’t explain to you what it’s like for a surgeon to lose a patient on a table and how demoralizing it is and how devastating it is,” Shaknovsky said in the deposition. “And I couldn’t tell the difference because I was so upset.”
However, in an account included in the Florida’s Health Department’s emergency order suspending Shaknovsky’s license, obtained by The New York Times, colleagues in the operating room said that they were concerned that Shaknovsky “did not have the skill level to safely perform this procedure.”
The report says that the procedure began as a laparoscopy but was switched to open surgery because he could not clearly see the organs. Shaknovsky, the report alleges, failed to document that Bryan had a distended colon.
As Bryan began to hemorrhage and went into cardiac arrest, medical staff tried to suction the blood. The report says that they began an emergency transfusion and tried to revive him.
However, the report says that Shaknovsky did not ask his colleagues for a clamp or cauterizer to quell the bleeding and even continued to dissect the organ.
“The staff looked at the readily identifiable liver on the table and were shocked when Dr Shaknovsky told them that it was a spleen,” the documents said. “One staff member felt sick to their stomach.”
In the report, the Health Department noted that the spleens and livers are “anatomically distinct, have different consistencies, and are different colors.” Both organs are also on different sides of the abdomen.
In a statement given to The NYT, Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast said that its surgeons face “rigorous credentialing standards” and need a license from the state to practice.
The statement also said that Shaknovsky was “never a Sacred Heart Emerald Coast employee and has not practiced at any of our facilities since August 2024.”
Source: independent.co.uk