Ouch! You go into hospital for a routine circumcision that your doctor has recommended, and you wake up to find, quite literally, there's nothing there!

 

Phillip Seaton, 64, woke up at the Jewish Hospital following the circumcision on 9 October 2007 to find his penis completely gone.

 

Mr Seaton, a lorry driver from Shelbyville, Kentucky, had undergone the circumcision to treat an inflammation problem. His surgeon, John Patterson, said the amputation was necessary because he discovered a rare and deadly form of penile cancer while performing the operation.

 

Lab tests later proved that he had a cancer known as squamous cell carcinoma.

 

But Mr Seaton

Assuming a routine circumcision necessitates a general anaesthetic rather than a local one, if I'd been the doctor I would simply have aborted the circumcision, waited for him to wake up and ask him "do you want the good news first or the bad news?"

 

Common sense tells you the surgeon did the right thing, but they should be a bit more street wise. Can you imagine how you'd feel if it happened to you? The patient is still going to be in deep shock either way, but surely better to take it in two stages - telling him the news he has cancer, and then giving him time for it all to sink in before he has to make the decision whether to have it removed. Waiting a bit would also allow the pathology lab to be 100% certain the affected cells in the penis were malignant. (Perhaps there are different types of penile cancer, some more fast-growing than others. One thinks of prostate cancer where some are fast growing and some a lot slower. The patient was 64 so if he had a slow-growing cancer that would change his prognosis). Of course, the patient may have gone into denial and refused to have it removed and then subsequently dying as the cancer spread throughout the body via secondaries.

 

I'm a bit mystified as to the doctor's certainty it was cancer. As it says in the article, it was a rare form of cancer. I can't believe the average doctor sees any cases of penile cancer - ever! If the surgeon performing this op was actually a urology specialist, what the heck is a guy like that doing performing such a routine operation? Doesn't make sense to me.

Can you imagine how you'd feel if it happened to you?

I would have been stark raving mad! I'd have got the best lawyer around and sued the pants off absolutely everyone! It's my body and I have an absolute right to another opinion. If I go into a hospital for any procedure, that is what I would expect to be done - nothing more (unless it was a dire emergency like my heart stopping).

 

My only hospital visit in the last 25 or so years was in Hong Kong to have a retina reattached. As I was being wheeled from my room to the operating theatre, no less than 3 nurses separately came up to me lying on the gurney, checked my notes and asked: "It is your left eye, Mr. Fountainhall(!), isn't it?" Jeez! The third time I felt like saying: "No, dear; it's my right toe!" Couldn't they read???

"It is your left eye, Mr. Fountainhall(!), isn't it?"

I had cataract surgery when I was 40. To be certain they were operating on the correct eye, they asked me the same question. They stuck a big red adhesive paper dot on my forehead over the eye that was meant for surgery. As I was being wheeled into surgery, I asked the nurse a silly question. Must have been the medication.

 

I said, "if you're a woman having a mastectomy, where do they put the dot?"

 

I couldn't remove the red dot for many days afterward. But I found it useful. It lit up when the coffee was ready.