Florida doctor Ramon Vazquez removes kidney from woman after taking it for tumor during spinal surgery

A Florida doctor confused a woman's healthy kidney with a cancerous tumor and decided to remove it during an operation of the spine.

In April 2016, Maureen Pacheco went to the Wellington Regional Medical Center to merge the lower back bones after being injured in a car accident the previous year.

She went home with one kidney.

During the operation, a doctor spotted a mbad in the Pacheco basin and, believing that it was a cancerous tumor, removed it.

However, it turned out that the mbad was not a tumor, but one of Pacheco's kidneys.

A lawsuit settled in September claimed that Pacheco had never had a say. Even worse, the doctor was not even the one who performed the back surgery.

according to The Palm Beach Post, Pacheco met the surgeon, Ramon Vazquez, shortly before his arrival in the operating room. Vazquez's job was simply to cut it so that orthopedic surgeons could perform back surgery.

"As you can imagine, when a person undergoes back surgery, they will never expect to wake up and are told that they have just woken up from anesthesia, that one of their kidneys has has been unnecessarily withdrawn, "said Pacheco's lawyer, Donald Ward.

Pacheco sued the surgeon, claiming that Vazquez and others had been medically negligent in unnecessarily cutting his healthy and fully functioning kidney.

The lawsuit alleged that Vazquez deviated from acceptable standards of medical care and treatment after failing to examine the radiology or informing the patient before taking one of his organs.

The prosecution added that this had the consequence that Pacheco had to suffer mental anguish, pain and bodily injury, disability and disfigurement.

The kidney on Pacheco's left side was a pelvic kidney. According to Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago, pelvic renal failure occurs when, during fetal development, the kidneys fail to return to their normal position above the waist and remain in the pelvis.

WPBF reported that Vazquez's lawyer, Mark Mittlemark, had alleged that the hospital was at fault because he had not informed the doctor that the patient had a pelvic kidney. The suit was settled for a "symbolic amount" but Mittlemark said that his client did not admit his responsibility and did not think he had done anything wrong.

The Florida Department of Health has filed a lawsuit against Vazquez. The doctor may lose his medical license if the case goes to trial.