Double Amputee After Unthinkable OR Blunder

surgeon in protective gear looking at camera during operation — Photo: Andrei_R / Shutterstock

A lawsuit says an Ohio hospital cut off the wrong leg during surgery, leaving a cancer patient a double amputee.

Story Snapshot

A 32-page complaint says surgeons removed the patient’s left leg instead of the marked right leg.
The patient’s attorney says the correct right leg was marked and still marked after the wrong leg was taken.
Reports say two surgical timeouts failed to stop the error, and key steps were done on the wrong limb.
The hospital acknowledged procedural failures and removed involved staff, according to local reporting.

Filed Complaint Details Name the Error and the Team

Washington County court records describe a 32-page complaint filed for Sharon Jacks. The filing alleges her right leg was the intended target, yet surgeons amputated her left leg in September 2025. The complaint reportedly names the hospital, the surgeon, and operating room staff as defendants. The lawsuit seeks compensatory and punitive damages for permanent disability, pain and suffering, and emotional distress tied to the wrong-site operation.

Attorney Brad Lane stated the surgeon marked Jacks’s right leg before surgery. Lane says that mark remained on the right leg after the team removed the left leg. Reports say two surgical timeouts were performed to verify the patient, the site, and the plan. Those timeouts did not prevent the team from proceeding on the wrong limb, according to the complaint’s summary in coverage.

Sequence Alleged: Prep and Tourniquet on the Wrong Limb

Coverage based on the complaint says the team prepared and draped the wrong leg. The summary adds a pneumatic tourniquet was placed on the wrong thigh before the operation moved forward. After the wrong-site procedure, Jacks later had her right leg amputated as well, leaving her a double amputee, according to multiple reports. The clinical reason and timing for the later right-leg removal are not detailed in the coverage cited.

Local reporting says the hospital acknowledged procedural failures and said expected operating room steps were not followed. The hospital stated that the event was avoidable and that involved staff were no longer in their roles. It also said its protocols had been reviewed by Mayo Clinic and the Ohio Department of Health. No full internal incident report or root-cause analysis is publicly available in the cited material.

Why Wrong-Site Surgery Is a Known “Never Event”

Patient-safety experts call wrong-site surgery a “never event” because standard checks should stop it. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality notes these errors are rare, about one in 112,000 procedures, meaning a typical hospital might see one every five to ten years. Even with a low rate, the harm is severe. National bodies have tracked dozens to hundreds of such sentinel events in single years, underscoring persistent risks in surgical workflows.

This poor woman is Sharon Jacks and she lives in Washington County, Ohio.

She went into surgery for a lower-right-leg amputation due to cancer found there.

The lawsuit says the team prepped the wrong leg, put the tourniquet on the wrong thigh, ran two required time-outs to… pic.twitter.com/eD4b0u9Fok

— My moms caregiver (@mymomcare) September 29, 2026

Research ties these failures to breakdowns in policy, records, and team communication. Analyses list common factors: not following protocol, not reading the chart closely, inconsistent documentation, and poor communication among providers. Timeouts are designed to fix that. But when the checklist becomes a box-tick, it can miss the basics: confirm the patient, confirm the side, confirm the site mark, and match the consent and the imaging. The complaint’s account, if proven, matches that classic failure chain.

What Matters Now for Accountability and Safety

This case raises simple questions with serious weight. Who read the chart? Who led the timeout? Who confirmed the site mark on the skin against the consent and imaging? Discovery could surface the operating room record, the timeout forms, and anesthesia logs. Those documents can show the exact moment the process broke and who had the last clear chance to stop it. For patients, this is about trust in basic surgical safety.

Where Policy Meets Common Sense

Hospitals write thick binders of rules, but safety lives in habits. Clear marks, loud read-backs, and true stop-points save limbs and lives. The reported hospital acknowledgment that protocols were not followed, and that staff were removed, points to human failure rather than a missing rule. The law will sort out damages. The country expects every operating room, public or private, to lock in discipline so a marked limb is the operated limb—every single time.