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The family of 70-year-old Alabama resident William Bryan is alleging a catastrophic and tragic instance of medical malpractice. In a recent lawsuit, they claim that Bryan’s surgeon, Thomas Shaknovsky of Florida, caused his death by mistakenly removing Bryan’s liver instead of his spleen, as planned. The mix-up appears to be the second time in two years that Shaknovsky has been accused of cutting out the wrong body part in a patient.
The personal injury law firm representing Bryan’s family, Zarzaur Law, said late last month that it was taking legal action against Shaknovsky. According to the lawsuit, Bryan and his wife Beverly were visiting their rental property in Florida when Bryan began to experience pain along his left side. He went to the Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast Hospital in Walton County and was admitted under the suspicion that something was wrong with his spleen. Shaknovsky and the hospital’s chief medical officer, Christopher Bacani, reportedly convinced the family that Bryan needed surgery in the hospital, warning that he could experience serious issues if he wasn’t treated urgently.
On August 21, 2024, Shaknovsky and his team went ahead with a planned laparoscopic splenectomy, but things allegedly went awry. Not only did Shaknovsky wrongly remove Bryan’s liver, he also cut open the organ’s major blood supply, leading to massive and ultimately fatal blood loss, according to the lawsuit. The human liver is typically on the right side of the body and is much larger than the left-sided spleen, making it hard to see how a doctor could mistake the two. But Shaknovsky allegedly labeled the body part he removed as a spleen, telling the family that it had migrated to the other side of the body and had become so big due to disease. The true identity of the organ was only confirmed following Bryan’s death, and the family was told that his intact spleen did appear to have a small cyst on it.
According to the lawsuit, this is not the first recent time that Shaknovsky has made a similar surgical error. Sometime in 2023, Shaknovsky reportedly removed part of a patient’s pancreas while planning to cut away the adrenal gland. The lawsuit claims that Shaknovsky reached a confidential settlement with the patient over this incident and that he still remains employed by the Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast Hospital as of August. In a statement to NBC News, the hospital said it is performing a through investigation into Bryan’s death.
“Patient safety is and remains our number one priority. Our thoughts and prayers remain with the family. We hold the privacy of our patients in the highest regard. We do not comment on specific patient cases or active litigation,” the hospital added in its statement.
The Walton County Sheriff’s Office and others are also looking into Bryan’s death. “Walton County Sheriff’s Office in conjunction with the District 1 Medical Examiner’s Office and Office of the State Attorney is reviewing the facts involving the death of William Bryan to determine if anything criminal took place,” the office told NBC News.
Bryan’s family is hoping to seek both criminal and civil charges against Shaknovsky and to keep him from ever performing surgery again.
“My husband died while helpless on the operating room table by Dr. Shaknovsky. I don’t want anyone else to die due to his incompetence at a hospital that should have known or knew he had previously made drastic, life-altering surgical mistakes,” said Beverly Bryan in a statement provided by the family’s lawyers.
