An Alabama, USA widow is suing an inept doctor – with a history of errors – and a hospital for killing her husband by removing his liver instead of his spleen in a botched surgery, and then engaging in a cover-up to conceal the truth.
Beverly Bryan was confident on 21 August as her husband headed to surgery to have his spleen removed at a Florida hospital. Bryan, a retired registered nurse, knew the procedure – a laparoscopic splenectomy – was safe, and the surgeon had assured her “it would be quick and over and done”.
“You'll see him back in a few minutes,” she recalled the doctor saying.
It was the last time she saw her husband alive, reports The Washington Post.
Now, nearly six months later, Bryan is suing the surgeon, Thomas J Shaknovsky, and the hospital where he operated on her husband, accusing them of wrongful death and medical malpractice.
In a 114-page complaint filed on 30 January in Florida’s First Judicial Circuit Court, Bryan alleges that Shaknovsky killed her husband by mistakenly removing his liver instead of his spleen, then participated in a conspiracy, which included the hospital’s CEO and chief medical officer, to cover up the fatal error by doctoring the death certificate and other state records.
Bryan (70) is also accusing Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast Hospital of employing a doctor who, before operating on Bryan’s husband, had repeatedly made serious mistakes, including one in 2023 in which he also operated on the wrong organ.
That incident, according to state records, resulted in a $400 000 settlement.
Bryan said she researched Shaknovsky and Ascension beforehand but found few, if any, red flags. She wants her lawsuit to spur lawmakers and others to make it easier for patients to discover doctors’ wrongdoing, complaints and malpractice settlements.
“It really needs to be more transparent when doctors have a bad history,” she said.
Shaknovsky did not respond to requests from The Washington Post to talk about Bryan’s allegations but told state investigators he couldn’t properly identify the organ he removed because of “his shock and the chaos of the situation” but assumed it was the spleen.
Florida Surgeon-General Joseph Ladapo determined in September that Shaknovsky was being “deceptive and untrue” during the interview and immediately suspended his medical licence.
An Ascension Sacred Heart spokesman declined to comment.
High-pressure situation
An MRI exam of Bill's abdomen and pelvis revealed that something was wrong with his spleen, according to the lawsuit.
Shaknovsky, the hospital’s on-call surgeon, recommended removing the spleen. The Bryans initially rejected his recommendation, requesting a transfer to a hospital that could provide a higher level of care, according to the suit. Bryan wanted to take her husband home to where they could get better care from their regular local doctors.
Shaknovsky warned that Bill risked bleeding to death if he left the hospital to make the nearly 650km journey home. For two days, Shaknovsky and others at the hospital allegedly pressured the Bryans to let them do the procedure, and finally they relented.
At 4.18pm on 21 August, Bryan signed a consent form for her husband to have laparoscopic surgery, and Shaknovsky started the procedure about 90 minutes later, the suit states. Meanwhile, several surgical staffers allegedly told the hospital’s chief medical officer, Joseph Bacani, that they were worried about doing the procedure at Ascension’s limited facilities and warned that they thought Shaknovsky was not skilled enough to perform it.
Bacani “did nothing to stop or alter this procedure in any way”, the complaint alleges.
An alleged cover-up
At 5.48pm, Shaknovsky and his team started the surgery, the suit states. Although it was supposed to be a laparoscopic splenectomy, a minimally invasive process requiring a few small incisions, Shaknovsky switched to open surgery because of poor visibility, according to the lawsuit and state disciplinary records.
Several staff watched Shaknovsky operate on the right side of Bryan’s body, the opposite side of where the spleen is normally located. Instead of removing Bryan’s spleen, Shaknovsky took out his liver, severing a major vein and causing devastating blood loss that killed Bryan, a prosecutor with Florida’s Department of Health alleged in a petition to revoke Shaknovsky’s medical licence.
Handing the organ to a nurse, Shaknovsky told her to mark it “spleen”, even though it weighed at least 10 times as much as the average spleen and was clearly a liver, according to the lawsuit. The nurse allegedly did as she was told.
Within minutes, other doctors and hospital authorities swarmed the operating room, the suit states. All of them allegedly recognised the organ that had been removed was a liver but nevertheless covered up Shaknovsky’s mistake by documenting on official records that he had cut out Bryan’s spleen.
Shaknovsky allegedly tried to persuade staff that it was the spleen. He repeatedly left and returned to the operating room to tell people Bryan had died of a “splenic aneurysm”, the suit states. When he told Bryan of her husband’s death, he allegedly told her the cause was a spleen so diseased that it had swelled to four times the normal size and shifted to the other side of his body.
An Ascension nurse chased Bryan into the parking lot and lied about how her husband had died to get her signature agreeing to forgo an autopsy, the suit states.
The cover-up fell apart when the district’s medical examiner performed an autopsy and determined that the organ which had been removed was the liver while his spleen was untouched and in the normal position, state disciplinary records show. The medical examiner ruled Bryan’s death a homicide caused by bleeding to death and having his liver removed.
On 24 September, Ladapo, Florida’s Surgeon-General, ordered an emergency suspension of Shaknovsky’s medical licence, citing not only Bryan’s botched splenectomy but also a 2023 procedure in which he allegedly removed part of a 58-year-old patient’s pancreas instead of cutting out a portion of their adrenal gland as intended.
The next month, medical officials in Alabama revoked his licence there, Bryan’s suit states.
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