5 Medical Operations From Around the World That Ran Into Huge Twists

A surgical operation can have two outcomes. It can succeed, or it can fail. But along with those two options, surgery can take a few extremely weird paths that no one would expect, as seen in the following medical stories from around the world. 

1. THE AIRBORNE COAT HANGER SURGERY 
2. THE PATIENT WAS A GODZILLA MONSTER 
3. THE DOCTOR’S HEART ATTACK 
4. THE DAUGHTER’S ASSISTANCE
5. THE PUNISHED PLASTIC SURGEONS

THE AIRBORNE COAT HANGER SURGERY 

On a flight from Hong Kong to London in 1995, staff asked passengers if any doctor was on board. Scottish surgeon Angus Wallace volunteered his services, and he found himself facing an odd but manageable situation. A passenger had boarded the flight despite falling off her motorcycle on the way to the airport, and she was now in pain. Wallace discovered a fracture in her forearm and treated it using a splint from the aircraft’s medical kit. 

An hour later, however, the woman was faring even worse. Wallace reexamined her and discovered a more serious lung injury. Her chest needed to be drained so she could continue breathing. Such emergencies often call for an emergency landing, but in this case, the change in pressure from descending could kill her before they reached the ground. He needed to operate in mid-air. 

The medical kit offered a scalpel and local anesthetic, but beyond that, he needed to improvise. As a disinfectant, he used brandy. He drained fluid from her chest into a bottle of Evian, hooked up to tubing with Scotch tape. To keep the chest open during draining, which is a process normally handled by a device called a trocar, he used a coat hanger. 

The operation succeeded, and Wallace now turned to the most complicated step: writing up a medical report. This was so complicated, you see, because it was unclear which time he should include in his documentation, as the plane had passed through multiple time zones. 

THE PATIENT WAS A GODZILLA MONSTER 

Doctors in Tokyo ran into a few issues in 1971 when a patient arrived at the hospital with abdominal pain. The first was that the man, Kenpachiro Satsuma, had a resistance to pain treatment. That meant the usual method of anesthesia was not going to work during the operation to remove his appendix. 

The second was that he was dressed as Hedorah, a Godzilla monster. Satsuma wasn’t some fan or cosplayer. He was acting as Hedorah in the movie Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster, and he had been wearing the costume while at a shoot when the pangs of appendicitis hit him.

Normally, an appendectomy patient is naked from the waist down during surgery. In this case, doctors found the 150-pound costume so difficult to remove that they left most of it on as they operated. It wasn’t a very pleasant experience for them, and was even less pleasant for Satsuma. But he was a professional stuntman, so he was likely used to pain.

THE DOCTOR’S HEART ATTACK 

In 2009, in Cardarelli Hospital in Naples, a team was operating on a cancer patient’s brain. Lead surgeon Claudio Vitale was tasked with removing a tumor from the patient. He felt a little setback during this operation, in the form of a heart attack in his own chest. 

From here, we can imagine the operation going in a few different ways. Perhaps a second team would now have to operate on 59-year-old Vitale, right in the same room, much like when an ambulance crashes and a second ambulance must arrive to treat its occupants.

Instead, Vitale went on operating, despite the team urging that he stop. He successfully removed the tumor, and the patient was soon recovering on schedule. Only then did he head off to get his arterial blockage cleared, followed by a well-deserved week off work for his own recovery. 

THE DAUGHTER’S ASSISTANCE

Early in 2024, a man in Austria suffered an accident to his head while cutting trees. The man, identified as “Gregor R.,” flew by helicopter to a hospital in the city of Graz, where he underwent surgery. He spent 11 days in intensive care, and then he was discharged so he could recover at home.

As far as Gregor knew, the team had operated on him without anything unusual happening. Months passed. Then he read in the newspaper that someone had lodged a complaint about the surgeons at this hospital. One doctor had invited their 13-year-old daughter into the operating theater and had let the girl drill into a patient’s head. A few months after this, the police contacted Gregor and let him know that, yes, Gregor had been the patient in question.

Following a month of investigating, the hospital fired that neurosurgeon as well as one other doctor who had been in charge that day. There has been no punishment for the girl who operated the drill, both because the hospital lacks the authority to punish her and because it appears she did an exemplary job. 

THE PUNISHED PLASTIC SURGEONS

A more serious punishment awaited the surgeons in our final story. This team operated on Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who ran Mexico’s Juárez Cartel until July 1997. That was the month when he underwent liposuction and facial reconstructive surgery, with the goal of changing his appearance to better avoid detection. Fuentes did not survive the operation. 

Later that year, authorities found the bodies of the surgeons, Jaime Godoy Singh and Ricardo Reyes Rincon. Both were inside barrels left at the side of a highway, encased in cement. Both had suffered severe torture before their deaths by strangulation. 

Evidently, the cartel had punished these doctors for their failure. But it’s also possible that there was more to Fuentes’s death. Fuentes didn’t die from organ failure or infection. He died because of the anesthetics he’d taken. 

Anesthesia risks are some of the potential dangers posed by any operation, but in this case, it appeared that the sedative and anesthesia had been mixed to make a lethal combination. It’s possible—but this is just speculation—that the doctors used this mixture to kill him on purpose, presumably on orders from some rival of Fuentes’.

An eight-hour operation would seem to be great camouflage for a murder like that, but it’s hardly foolproof. And drug cartels don’t take kindly to associates who break oaths, Hippocratic or otherwise.