Search Here

A British man is suing a hospital after surgeons there accidentally removed the wrong testicle during his cancer surgery.

The 48-year-old man said that his botched operation has left him unable to have children. 

The company director said that he had gone into an operating room in June at Salisbury District Hospital expecting to have a cancerous testicle removed. During the operation, surgeons had realized their mistake 40 minutes after the initial operation and tried to reattach the testicle.

According to the Daily Mail, surgeons froze the man's disconnected healthy testicle as a plastic surgeon rushed to the scene to try to undo the damage made on the patient.  However, in the end, doctors were unable to reattach the patient's healthy testicle.

The man who comes from Wiltshire in southwest England has asked not to be named.  He says that the botched surgery robbed him of his ability to have children, and is now hoping to be awarded compensation.

While the man already has a family from a previous relationship, he will not be able to have any more children with his present partner.

"It seems I can no longer father children. I have gone through incredible stress and strain," he said, according to the Daily Mail.

"The matter is in the hands of my solicitor," he said, according to the Metro newspaper. "She is about to issue proceedings now. I have no other comment to make."

A patient watchdog group in Wiltshire is calling for an investigation into the surgical blunder.

"This is a tragic thing to have happened," Phil Matthews, chairman of the Wiltshire Involvement Network, told Metro. "With this type of operation men need confidence they can put their trust fully in the hospital."

The Salisbury District Hospital has apologized to the 48-year-old patient.

"We have received notification from solicitors of pending legal action," the Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust told the local Salisbury Journal.. "This is a regrettable incident and the trust once again offers its sincere apologies to the patient."

"The patient was informed straight after the completion of surgery of the situation and that additional surgery had taken place to rectify this," the statement added. "The trust carried out a thorough investigation, and, as part of this, the trust immediately made changes to its processes."

Testicular cancer is cancer that starts in the testicles, which are the male reproductive glands located in the scrotum.  Last year 360 men died from testicular cancer in the United States, according to the National Cancer Institute.