Just about everyone knows Miley Cyrus’ famous lyric, “Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has those days.” Yeah, it’s super inspiring and all, but some people who should not take comfort in Miley’s motto.
I’m looking at you, doctors. Cue the story of a British man who went into the hospital to have his bladder checked—but instead left with a circumcised penis because doctors mixed up his paperwork.
A National Health Service (NHS) report says the unnamed patient went in for a cystoscopy, a procedure to look inside the bladder using a thin camera inserted through the urethra, at a hospital in Leicester, England. But thanks to a paperwork snafu, doctors surgically removed the foreskin from his penis instead. Yikes.
The NHS has dubbed this a “never event,” or a very serious yet very preventable medical error that should never, ever have happened. This unfortunate mistake was one of eight never events that happened in 2018 at hospitals belonging to the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust.
Another, perhaps even more terrifying, example of one of the never events listed in the report: a woman’s ovaries being removed by mistake. Can. You. Imagine.
For all of those who don’t have a penis: Circumcision is the surgical removal of the skin covering the tip of the penis, according to Mayo Clinic. It’s fairly common for newborns to be circumcised, especially in the United States. But it’s much less common past the newborn stage. The decision to have a baby circumcised is totally up to the parents, but circumcision has some health advantages, such as a lower risk of urinary tract infections and sexually transmitted infections.
So while this man may have scored a few health benefits out of the mix-up, we highly doubt that was what crossed his mind when doctors had to tell him, “Everybody makes mistakes.”
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