A 72-year-old man is suing the University of Washington Medical Center after he claims surgeons removed the wrong organ and left him in serious pain. George Plano was diagnosed with appendicitis and underwent surgery in December 2022 to have his appendix removed. Instead, he says doctors removed part of his colon, and he’s been paying the price for their careless mistake ever since.
The surgery didn’t decrease his pain.
George Piano’s stomach continued to hurt after the surgery, and he eventually underwent additional scans that revealed his appendix was still there — but part of his large intestine wasn’t.
However, because he had gone for so long without treatment, his bowel had begun to leak into his abdomen, which caused “much worse” pain due to an infection that occurred on top of the appendix issue, per KIRO 7.
Piano had to undergo four further surgeries.
These procedures ended with him having an ileostomy bag, but even that was preferable to the constant pain he was experiencing.
He even had a pool ball-sized wound in his stomach where the operations took place. All of this could have been avoided if doctors had done their jobs correctly the first time.
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He’s suing the hospital for an undisclosed sum for damages.
George Piano’s lawsuit is against the hospital, as well as his surgeons Nidhi Udyavar and Paul Herman. His lawyer, Ed Moore, said that cases like this won clients somewhere between $500,000 and $3 million.
“It’s been a year of hell,” Piano said. “I’m not the same person I was when this started. But I feel very lucky I am still alive. We didn’t want it to happen to someone else.”
“Someone needed to put a stop to this and take responsibility and say this happened, we need to take steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
