A disturbing and deadly incident on a surgery table left a patient dead and the doctor responsible for the fatally unskilled surgery disgraced and stripped of his medical license.
The decision to strip Dr. Thomas Shaknovsky of his medical license was declared in a Tuesday emergency order from the Florida Department of Health.
The department asserts Shaknovsky not only violated state medical statues, but acted dishonestly to cover his tracks and hide the disturbing truth about the operating table death under his knife.
According to the Pensacola News Journal, the state health department pointed to two separate situations in which Shaknovsky botched surgeries.
The first incident revolves around an unidentified 58-year-old patient who was found to have a mass on his left adrenal gland. According to officials, instead of operating on the man’s adrenal gland, Shaknovsky instead removed a piece of the patient’s pancreas.
Pathology results confirmed the removed tissue was part of a pancreas, but Shaknovsky insisted that the patient’s adrenal gland “migrated” to another part of the body.
The patient was left with long-term problems after going under Shaknovsky’s knife.
The second and more egregious incident involves 70-year-old Alabama native William Bryan, who was visiting his Destin, Florida, condo with his wife when he began feeling a pain in his side.
Bryan was suspected of having an enlarged spleen, and Shaknovsky determined surgery was the best course of action.
Should Shaknovsky face criminal charges?
The patient decided to return to his Alabama home and have the procedure done there. Shaknovsky cautioned him against this, saying the movement would endanger Bryan even more. After three days, Bryan relented and agreed to surgery at Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast.
Even at the outset of the surgery, things did not appear right.
According to the Florida Department of Health, operating room staff were initially concerned about the time Shaknovsky scheduled the surgery: 4 p.m. on August 21. The timing meant that only a skeleton crew would be present for the surgery.
The FDOH said hospital staff realized the planned splenectomy was among the “complicated procedures that could quickly deteriorate and were not regularly performed at Ascension.”
Shaknovsky arrived an hour late to the surgery. While the operation began as a laparoscopic procedure, the doctor opened Bryan up due to poor visibility and blood obscuring his work area. Bryan began to bleed out and suffered cardiac arrest during Shaknovsky’s cuts, but the doctor’s response was allegedly to “blindly” fire a stapling device into the hemorrhaging area.
Eventually, a “large” organ was removed, which Shaknovsky declared a spleen. It was actually Bryan’s liver.
“The staff looked at the readily identifiable liver on the table and were shocked when Dr. Shaknovsky told them it was a spleen,” the FDOH said. “One staff member felt sick to their stomach.”
Bryan passed away as staff desperately tried to save him. Under Shaknovsky’s direction, hospital staff labeled the obvious liver a “spleen” and sent it to a pathology lab.
An autopsy found Bryan’s spleen still intact, his liver missing, and the largest vein in his body, the inferior vena cava, severed. The FDOH’s order says the dissected vein was the precipitating cause for Bryan’s death.
Shaknovsky denied wrongdoing and responsibility for the death, which when coupled with his obvious error in cutting a major vein and inability to identify basic organs led to the FDOH’s final decision to label the disgraced physician an “immediate, serious danger to the health, welfare, and safety of the public.”
The Walton County Sheriff’s Office is currently investigating Shaknovsky for any criminal negligence that may have taken place during the surgery.
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