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After suffering years of back pain from a car accident, Maureen Pacheco visited the Wellington Regional Medical Center in 2016 to fuse the bones of her lower back, a procedure officially known as lumbar interbody fusion. previous instrumented L5-S1.
Shortly before being operated on April 29, 2016, Pacheco met with Dr. Ramon Vazquez, who was responsible for the operation, officials said.
Vazquez was to open Pacheco and then 51, so that his orthopedic surgeons could perform the operation of the back.
During the operation, Vazquez "noticed a pelvic mass and posed the presumptive diagnosis of a gynecological malignancy, lymphoma and / or other metastatic disease", said an administrative complaint lodged against the doctor by the Florida Department of Health.
So, Vazquez cut him off and removed him from Pacheco's body, the authorities said.
But the pelvic mass that he thought he had noticed was actually an intact pelvic kidney, a pathologist confirmed a month later.
"Few medical errors are as vivid and terrifying as those involving patients who have undergone surgery on a bad part of the body," according to the Agency for Health Research and Quality.
Such incidents are called "never events," which means that there are "errors that should never occur and indicate serious underlying security issues," wrote l & # 39; AHRQ.
The AHRQ found that such errors occurred in about one out of 112,000 surgical procedures, or "infrequent enough for a particular hospital to experience such an error every 5 to 10 years."
Pacheco filed a malpractice complaint that was settled in September.
The pelvic kidneys are kidney organs that are not mounted in the normal abdominal area during fetal development. According to the trial, two MRIs performed prior to Pacheco's operation showed she had a kidney in the pelvic area.
The prosecution claimed that Vazquez did not examine the MRI. He also claimed that he had not obtained Pacheco's consent to withdraw what he thought was a mass.
"As you can imagine, when a person undergoes a back operation, she would never expect to wake up and is told, when she just woke up from anesthesia , that one of his kidneys was unnecessarily removed, "Pacheco's lawyer, Donald J. Ward, told the Palm Beach Post.
Vazquez's lawyer told the newspaper that Wellington Regional had not informed the patient that the patient had a pelvic kidney, the Post wrote.
In a statement to InsideEdition.com, Vazquez's lawyer said: "Dr. Vazquez has settled the case for a nominal amount because of the uncertainty of the litigation and has in no way acknowledged his responsibility by accepting this regulation. "
In a statement to InsideEdition.com, a spokesperson for the Wellington Regional Medical Center said, "Dr. Vazquez was not and was never employed by the Wellington Regional Medical Center. Independent enjoying the privileges of the medical staff at Wellington Regional as well as other hospitals in Palm Beach County.
"Dr. Vazquez is no longer a Wellington Regional medical staff and Wellington Regional has taken all the necessary and appropriate steps to review the circumstances of this very unfortunate incident.In the last 30 years of the Wellington Regional Medical Center, an incident of this nature has never occurred before or since. "
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