When we go to doctors, we usually trust them to do their best to try to help us. However, doctors are humans, too, and that means they make mistakes. Some doctors do their best not make mistakes; others, not so much. As the health care system grows ever more complex and complicated, mistakes are bound to happen. Sometimes, these mistakes can cause lifelong problems. Other times, they’re lethal.

10 Alyssa Hemmelgarn Died From A Hospital Infection

In 2007, nine-year-old Alyssa Hemmelgarn became sick and didn’t seem to be getting any better. She had swollen glands and cold sores that wouldn’t disappear. Because of the malaise that Alyssa displayed, her mother, Carole, suspected that she may have had mono. However, when she took her daughter to the doctor, she received some devastating news. Alyssa was admitted to a Denver hospital, where she was diagnosed with leukemia.

That alone was tragic enough, but it wasn’t the end for Carole or Alyssa. After a week of treatment, Alyssa seemed to be doing better. She and her mother managed to walk around the hospital and watch a movie, but as the evening arrived, Alyssa began to feel worse. Soon after, she began to experience dire symptoms. Despite their best efforts, doctors couldn’t help Alyssa, and she soon died.

Alyssa wasn’t killed by leukemia. The actual cause was Clostridium difficile, a hospital-acquired infection that had grown more severe with each day. No one managed to find the infection before Alyssa died. It turned out that a doctor had noted Alyssa as “anxious,” so she was given Ativan, which could have covered up her symptoms. Another reason that nothing was done was the prohibitive cost to treat severe infections like C. diff. Antibiotics pumped directly into a large vein via IV costs $50,000, which makes many doctors leery to use it unless it’s absolutely necessary.

Alyssa did not die in vain, though. Since her death, there have been numerous reforms in treatment throughout hospitals in Colorado.

9 Richard Smith Died From Receiving A Paralytic

Richard Smith, 79 years old, had kidney disease, which required him to receive dialysis. In 2010, Smith was undergoing dialysis when he started to experience shortness of breath. He was admitted to the ICU. The next day, he complained of a stomachache. He was prescribed an antacid, which he received from his nurse afterward. Only . . . it wasn’t an antacid.

Smith was given pancuronium, a paralytic and muscle relaxant that is used for intubation in small doses and for lethal injection in larger ones. After Smith was given the drug, he became unresponsive. The drug had put him into respiratory arrest. Apparently, the packaging for the antacid and for the paralytic looked similar, which was the cause of the mix-up. While doctors did manage to resuscitate Smith, he was brain-dead and remained in a vegetative state until his death one month later.

According to Andrew Yaffa, the Smith family lawyer, the case was “the worst case of medical neglect” he had ever seen. To have given Smith the wrong drug, the nurse would have had to fail to follow numerous protocols: She “failed to look and read what medication he was taking [ . . . ] failed to scan to determine the right count for the medication, and failed to match the patient’s ID with the scanned medication.” To add insult to injury, the hospital appeared to show no remorse, even allowing the nurse to remain on the same floor that Smith had died on. They did, however, remove pancuronium from all nurses’ stations in the hospital and only allow anesthesiologists to have access to the drug.

8 Regina Turner Had The Wrong Surgery

Regina Turner endured many people’s worst nightmare concerning surgery—receiving the wrong operation. Her ordeal was already frightening enough: She had been admitted to the hospital for a “left-sided craniotomy bypass,” which was supposed to prevent Turner from having continued strokes, as she’d previously had a series of mini-strokes, which affected her ability to talk. After having the wrong surgery, her health deteriorated.

Before she went into surgery, Turner was still in relatively good shape. She was “mobile, cognizant, and able to care for herself.” According to the lawsuit filed against hospital, Turner’s condition worsened: “After the incorrect surgery, [Turner] requires around-the-clock care for her basic needs. [ . . . ] [She] will also continue to suffer from emotional distress, anxiety, disfigurement and depression.”

Rather than a left-side bypass, she had been given a right-side bypass, which caused considerable damage to her nervous system. Once the mistake was caught, the correct procedure was done, but Turner remained in poor health. The failure of anyone to catch the doctors’ mistake meant that numerous protocols were overlooked. Generally, before an operation, doctors and nurses will have a “time-out,” where they discuss in depth the details of the surgery and go over exactly what needs to be done. The surgeon also has to mark exactly where the surgery is to be performed. Apparently, this wasn’t enough to keep them from operating on the wrong side.

7 Pablo Garcia Received A Massive Overdose

We can generally agree that technology has vastly improved our lives, but it can still make mistakes, as can the people using it. This was the case when a 16-year-old boy named Pablo Garcia was admitted to the hospital for a colonoscopy to examine intestinal polyps. What should have been a completely routine procedure nearly became a lethal tragedy.

Garcia had a rare genetic disorder called NEMO deficiency syndrome, which causes recurrent infections and gastrointestinal issues. Because he was so susceptible to infection, Garcia required frequent antibiotic treatments. While in the hospital, Garcia had been prescribed the drug Septra for his infections. It’s fairly easy to determine how much of the drug to give to someone. It’s all dependent on conversions based on weight and age, which can be easily calculated with computers using a program called Epic EHR.

The program had been set to “milligrams,” which means that it would calculate how many milligrams of a drug should be given based on how many kilograms the patient weighed. However, the nurse treating Garcia reset the program and didn’t catch that it had now been set to “milligrams per kilogram.” When she typed in his dose, 160 milligrams of Septra, it multiplied it by Garcia’s weight. The dose equaled 38.5 pills, the largest dose ever recorded. Rather than question the machine, the nurse doled out the pills. Soon after, Garcia had a grand mal seizure, nearly dying. Luckily, he managed to survive. The case of Pablo Garcia illustrates quite clearly how dangerous it is to depend too much on technology.

6 Andy Warhol Received Too Many Fluids

In 1987, Andy Warhol required gallbladder surgery. Despite having a phobia of hospitals and doctors in general, he agreed to the surgery, which seemed to be successful. As usual for someone in a hospital, Warhol received fluids to remain hydrated. Unfortunately, he slipped into a coma and soon died.

Why had Warhol died after a routine procedure? An inquiry found that at the time of his death, Warhol was anemic. He had been before he was admitted, but doctors said he was in good enough condition for surgery. Afterward, though, it was discovered that Warhol had been receiving twice the amount of fluids he needed, which caused his body to drain itself of minerals, leading to his death. He had been unattended, and internal pressure built up, causing heart failure. According to Warhol’s private physician, Dr. Denton S. Cox, the 58-year-old artist hadn’t been looked over by any physicians, and the nurses rarely, if ever, checked up on him. He was being pumped full of morphine, which along with loss of nutrients due to excess fluids, caused his body to fill up.

During his autopsy, it was discovered that Warhol’s lungs and trachea had completely filled with fluid. The condition that Warhol died from could have been easily treated if someone on the staff would have simply paid attention.

5 Robert Stuart And Darren Hughes Died From Worm-Infested Kidneys

In 2014, an unknown alcoholic died in Northern England from what was believed to be meningitis. He was only 39, but he was a heavy drinker. After his death, his organs were rightfully rejected for donation because of their poor functioning, and the cause of death could have caused complications for any recipients. While they should have been destroyed, they were instead given to two unfortunate patients.

Robert Stuart and Darren Hughes both needed kidney transplants, so when two arrived, it must have seemed like a godsend. Argiris Asderakis, the consultant surgeon who accepted the kidneys, claimed that the patients knew there was significant risk because the donor had died from meningitis. Both patients accepted them and died from meningitis soon after. It became clear that the kidneys were infected with a rare parasitic worm called Halicephalobus gingivalis, which is primarily found in horses. At the time, there was no test that could determine whether or not the kidneys were infected with the parasite.

While the surgeon claimed no responsibility, the patients’ families said that they had not been given all of the information involving the risks associated with organ transplants. Even if the worms had not been present in the kidneys, the fact that they had been infected with meningitis would have posed significant risk that the patients would die while on dialysis. Since there had been no reported cases of the parasite in the UK, there was no reason to look for it. It still remains rare today, with only five reported cases in the world, but it’s worth the effort to check for it if you are ever in need of a new organ.

4 Rodney English Received A Bad Blood Transfusion

Rodney English, age 34, had been in and out of the hospital for most of his life due to spina bifida, a congenital disorder. When he was in the hospital receiving an operation for an infection, it wasn’t surprising that he needed a blood transfusion. After the procedure, he seemed to be recovering very well. However, his girlfriend quickly noticed that something was wrong. He couldn’t stay awake, and one day, he fell asleep and never woke up.

It wasn’t his condition or the procedure that killed him but rather a mislabeled blood transfusion. This is not a common phenomenon in any way. There are multiple layers of safety checks from the moment the blood leaves the blood bank to when it’s finally given to the patient. However, despite these protocols, they failed to catch the fact that English was receiving the wrong blood type. In a further act of incompetence, English’s family wasn’t informed of the mistake. They were told that English died from “anemia,” which was also listed as the cause of death.

It wasn’t until a CBS investigation that English’s family learned the truth. Another shocking revelation came when they learned that the blood came from a Red Cross facility in Atlanta that had 25 violations noted by the FDA in 1999 and had been fined for further allegations around the time that English died. When asked why Piedmont Hospital did not tell the family the true cause of death, they responded by saying that they never revealed anything about a patient’s death until there was “full information to share.”

3 Barry Morguloff Was Operated On By A Substance-Abusing Surgeon

When you’re on the operating room table, your life is quite literally in the surgeon’s hands. Knowing this, you would naturally hope that the surgeon operating on you would be of sound mind and body and competent enough to do his job. Barry Morguloff’s surgeon, on the other hand, was a man who committed numerous violations and should have never been allowed to practice medicine.

Morguloff first went to the hospital complaining of back pain. He was given steroid injections, but they didn’t help. He was then referred to Dr. Christopher Duntsch for spinal fusion, a delicate surgery that worked directly with the nerves in the spinal cord. When Morguloff emerged from surgery, the pain was still there; in fact, it had grown worse. He was given painkillers, but after six months, he was still in pain. When another doctor examined Morguloff, he discovered that bone fragments had been left on the nerves, and the hardware in his spine was installed incorrectly. It took another surgery to fix it.

How could such glaring mistakes have been committed by a supposedly accredited surgeon? Dr. Randall Kirby, a surgeon who assisted Duntsch, claimed that he had a surgical technique like a first-year medical student and had little to no knowledge of the spinal system. Other patients of Duntsch also complained that they only grew worse after seeing him.

Not only was Duntsch completely incompetent, but it also became clear that he was using drugs while working. A bottle of vodka was in his desk, he was using painkillers, and a bag of white powder was found in his private bathroom. He left one patient in the operating room so he could go to Las Vegas. He skipped five drug tests during his time at the hospital. The reason he was allowed to operate was the fact that the hospital had advanced him $600,000 to move from Tennessee to Dallas, and they wanted to recoup their investment no matter the consequences.

2 Riley McDougall Was Given Ambien Instead Of Antibiotics

When an adult starts to suffer from insomnia for whatever reason, they might go to their doctor for help, and they might be prescribed Ambien, an effective and popular sleep aid. In adults, Ambien can ease insomnia; in a child, it can have terrifying mental effects. It is for this reason that children are rarely, if ever, prescribed the drug. Now imagine how bad it was when a 12-year-old girl was given the drug by accident.

Riley McDougall was prescribed antibiotics, but when she started taking her pills, she became dazed and experienced frightening hallucinations. She tried to remove stair railings, thinking they were curtains, and saw other frightening manifestations. The episode was caught on camera by her mother, Coleen. Riley was taken to the emergency room, where she was told that she’d had a bad reaction to Sudafed, which she was taking for a cold. She was released and went back home. Coleen didn’t give Riley the Sudafed this time but continued to give her the “antibiotics.” Riley started experiencing double vision 20 minutes later. Coleen called the pharmacy and described the pills to the pharmacist along with their effects.

What the pharmacist told her explained it all: The pills were not azithromycin, the antibiotic Riley needed, but Ambien. The Ambien pills were white and hardly resembled azithromycin pills, which are pink. Coleen filed a lawsuit against the local CVS and said that her daughter’s reaction should serve as a warning to everyone. About prescriptions, she said: “Make sure you really read your prescriptions, and make sure it’s the right thing.”

1 Jack Startz Hooked Patients On Drugs And Destroyed Their Faces

To many, celebrities undergoing frequent cosmetic surgeries to keep looking “fresh” is nothing more than a joke. After all, if they have that much money to throw around needlessly, then why should we care? In the case of Beverly Hills surgeon Jack Startz, celebrity plastic surgery took a dark turn. Recently, his horrifying practice has come back to light due to the HBO film Behind the Candelabra, where he is portrayed as an eccentric surgeon who will do anything for his client, Liberace. In reality, though, he was an unethical monster.

In 1979, Liberace, the world-renowned showman, watched himself on The Tonight Show and was horrified by what he saw. He felt that he looked old and decided to get a face-lift. He went to ear, nose, and throat specialist Jack Startz, who agreed to perform the procedure. The result—Liberace’s face was so tight that he couldn’t fully shut his eyelids, even when he was sleeping. Despite this, Liberace wanted his partner, Scott Thorson, to receive plastic surgery to resemble a younger version of himself. Startz agreed to do this, too. In the process, Startz put Thorson on a “Hollywood diet,” which was little more than a highly addictive cocktail made of drugs like pharmaceutical cocaine, quaaludes, and amphetamines, which left Thorson dependent on them.

The reason Startz agreed to do these questionable procedures was the fact that he was experiencing financial problems related to his own alcoholism and drug use. He soon found a gold mine in silicone injections. He performed them constantly without any regard for his patients because he needed the money. The results were scary: Elaine Young, a celebrity realtor, was a high-profile victim of his practice. Starting in 1977, Young received monthly silicone injections from Startz. At first, the results seemed to defy reality, so much so that Young recommended Dr. Startz to all her friends and clients.

Within three years, though, something started to go wrong. The silicone in her face began to shift and move, severely deforming it. She tried to contact Dr. Startz, but he didn’t return her calls. She learned that over 100 lawsuits had been filed against him. From 1965 to 1979, Startz had injected 2,000 people with silicone, many of whom were experiencing the same effects as Young. Facing mounting legal issues, possible jail time, and severe substance abuse, Startz put a gun in his mouth and shot himself in 1985.

Gordon Gora is a struggling author who is desperately trying to make it. He is working on several projects. You can write him at [email protected].

A lot of students hate math, even though the world runs on mathematics. Huge sums of money and equipment worth millions of dollars have been lost simply because someone made some tiny math mistake. Computers also have made errors like this, too, but that can still be blamed on humans since we did the programming.

To be clear, some calamities were caused by errors involving complex math, which is arguably more forgivable. However, the ones we have here are mostly ridiculously simple mistakes that even an elementary school student might not have made.

10 Gulf War Scud Missile Attack

On February 25, 1991, an Iraqi “Scud” missile struck a US Army base in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, killing 28 soldiers and injuring 100 others. The disaster was surprising, considering that the base was protected by a Patriot missile air defense system. Investigations revealed that the system did not attempt to intercept the Scud.

The error was traced to the software powering the clock of the system. The clock recorded time in deciseconds (one tenth of a second) but stored that data as an integer. It converted the time into a 24-bit floating point number to do this. However, rounding the times in order to convert them led to gradually increasing inaccuracy as the system operated. As a result, the system was not able to intercept missiles after 20 hours of continuous use.

At the time of the attack, the Patriot missile battery in question had been operating for 100 hours. The time disparity was such that it looked in the wrong part of the sky for the incoming missile and therefore found no target. The US Army had been made aware of this software issue and had released an update on February 16. The update only reached the Dharan base on February 26, a day after the attack.^[1]

9 Spain’s S-80 Submarine Program

In 2003, Spain launched the $2.7 billion S-80 submarine program to build four diesel-electric submarines for the Spanish navy. Spain had almost completed one of the submarines in 2013, when it discovered that the sub was 70 tons heavier than it should have been. The Spanish navy feared the submarine would never surface if it went underwater.

The submarine ended up heavy after someone put a decimal point in the wrong spot during calculations. No one discovered the error until the first submarine was completed, and the other three were already under construction. Spain later signed a $14 million deal with Electric Boat of Groton, Connecticut, to help them reduce the weight of the 2,200-ton submarine.^[2]

8 Air Canada Flight 143

In July 1983, an Air Canada Boeing 767 flying from Ottawa to Edmonton with 69 passengers and crew had to crash-land after running out of fuel at 12,500 meters (41,000 ft). The engines suddenly lost power, and the airplane started gliding to the ground. It glided for 100 kilometers (60 mi) before landing in Gimli, Manitoba.

It came down on a racetrack that had originally been a runway. Luckily, there were no deaths. However, two people had minor injuries, and the nose gear was destroyed. This landing earned Flight 143 the nickname of “Gimli Glider.”

The accident was traced to a conversion error. Air Canada used the imperial system of measurement but was converting to the metric system, which this Boeing 767 already used. Air Canada ground crews had used the imperial system when they refueled the airplane. They measured the fuel in pounds instead of kilograms.

One kilogram equals 2.2 pounds. This meant the airplane had only around half the amount of fuel it required to complete the flight. The pilots did not notice the discrepancy because the fuel gauge was not working. Ground crews used drip sticks to measure the fuel at the time they filled the tanks.

Interestingly, the ground crews made the mistake twice. The first was in Montreal, and the second was in Ottawa. The airplane made the Montreal-to-Ottawa flight without incident but literally flew into problems when it was flying from Ottawa to Edmonton.^[3]

7 Sinking Of The Vasa

On August 10, 1628, Sweden launched a new, heavily armed, and large warship: the Vasa. The vessel had barely sailed for 20 minutes when it sank less than a mile from shore. Thirty people died in the sinking. The ship was later retrieved in the 20th century and is now held at the Vasa Museum.

Historians measured the entire ship and discovered that its builders used two different units of measurement. One was the Swedish foot, and the other was the Amsterdam foot. A Swedish foot is 12 inches, while an Amsterdam foot is 11 inches.

The difference between both units of measurements caused one side to end up heavier than the other. This was why the ship leaned to one side and promptly sank after it was hit by two gusts of wind. Historians add that the effect of the wind was worsened by the fact that the top of the ship was heavier than its bottom.^[4]

6 Mars Climate Orbiter Crash

The Mars Climate Orbiter was a $125-million joint project between Lockheed Martin and NASA/JPL. The project suffered an embarrassing end when the orbiter most likely crashed into Mars due to a simple conversion error in 1999. Lockheed Martin used the imperial system of measurement while programming software, but NASA used the metric system.

Engineers at NASA would have detected the error if they’d been paying attention. However, they did not. No one realized something was amiss throughout the Mars Climate Orbiter‘s nine-month journey to Mars, either. The mistake only became obvious when NASA lost contact with the orbiter.

In response to the incident, John Logsdon of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute said the whole thing was “dumb.” John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists added, “It was embarrassing to lose a spacecraft to such a simple math error.”^[5]

5 Ariane 5 Rocket Explosion

On June 4, 1996, the European Space Agency’s Ariane 5 rocket exploded 37 seconds after takeoff. Onboard the spacecraft were four satellites. The rocket and satellites cost $370 million. The accident was traced to an integer overflow error in the software used for launching the rocket.

An integer overflow is a mathematical error that occurs when the figures generated by a system exceeds the memory of that system. The Ariane 5 operated on 16-bit software capable of storing figures up to 32,767. The rocket managed to generate figures way above that.

The European Space Agency used the same software they’d previously used in Ariane 4 rockets. They had problems with the Ariane 5 because it was faster than the Ariane 4. Faster means larger figures. The software could not handle the large readings, causing the rocket to go rogue. Ground control ordered it to self-destruct.^[6]

4 Bank Of America’s Dividend Payments And Stock Buybacks

The Federal Reserve regularly makes banks undergo stress tests. A stress test is the analysis of the financial condition of a bank under a stimulated negative economic situation. Stress tests are necessary to determine if a bank is healthy enough to overcome a terrible recession or financial crisis.

In 2014, Bank of America revealed that it had passed a Federal Reserve stress test for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis. The bank added that it was going to pay dividends to its shareholders and buy back $4 billion worth of stock. The bank later retracted the statement and revealed that it had made some mistakes.

Bank of America had not passed the stress test. It only thought it did because it had made a mistake in determining the values of some bonds owned by its subsidiary, Merrill Lynch. Shareholders weren’t happy, and the stock of the bank fell by $9 billion (five percent of its total value) the same day the error was revealed.^[7]

3 The Laufenberg Bridge Problem

A while back, Germany and Switzerland agreed to build a bridge over the Rhine between their cities on either side, both named Laufenburg. As per the agreement, each country would start construction from their side of the river and meet in the middle. The bridge was nearing completion in 2003, when both nations realized that one half of the bridge was 54 centimeters (21 in) higher than the other.

The error came up because of how each country defined the term “sea level.” Most countries have different methods of determining the sea level, considering that it’s not the same everywhere. Germany uses the North Sea to define its sea level, while Switzerland prefers the Mediterranean sea.

There was a difference of 27 centimeters between the countries’ respective sea levels. Germany and Switzerland knew this and had factored it into their calculations. However, someone did so in such a way that the disparity was doubled, causing one side of the bridge to rise by 54 centimeters more than it should have.^[8]

2 France’s Oversized Train Problem

In 2014, Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer francai (SNCF), France’s state railway operator, discovered its new high-speed trains were too wide for 1,300 stations across the country. The problem was that it had ordered 1,860 of the trains from Alstom of France and Bombardier of Canada. SNCF determined that it needed to reduce the width of the trains so that the stations could accommodate them. The error cost millions of euros.

The incident generated some displeasure in France; the transport minister referred to it as “comically tragic.” Canard Enchaine, a weekly satirical paper, made a cartoon in which commuters on a platform were told to “pull in their stomachs” as one of the new trains approached the station.

The mistake happened because French train stations vary in size. SNCF knew this and had requested the Reseau ferre de France (RFF), which was in charge of the tracks, to measure the space around the tracks. SNCF and RFF ended up with some problems after it was realized that RFF had skipped 1,300 older stations in its initial calculations. These stations were narrower than others. It was too late, as some trains had been delivered, and more were under construction.^[9]

1 The Amsterdam City Council’s €188 Million Housing Benefits Error

In December 2013, the finance office of the Amsterdam city council sent out €188 million to over 10,000 poor families living in the city. The city later discovered that it had made an error in the payments. It originally planned to send €1.8 million and not €188 million.

The payment software was programmed in cents and not euros. People received €15,500 instead of €155 and, in one case, €34,000 instead of €340.

Luckily, the city had been able to recover all of the money except for €2.4 million at the time the error was revealed in the news. It was expected that the city would have a hard time recovering €1.2 million of that. That is a substantial amount, along with the €300,000 the city had already spent on rectifying the calamity.^[10]