This question was originally posted on Quora.com and was answered by Bob Balfour, former Retired Operating Room / Neuro ICU Nurse . It depends on the surgeon. When I was working in the OR there was very little oversight regarding surgical competence so a few surgeons worked well past their prime. Getting lost inside a patient’s abdomen happened quite frequently with one past his prime surgeon. Dead spaces were present in the tissue layers because of incomplete closure and abscesses were the end result. Common bile duct injury during cholecystectomy was a hazard. Diagnostic measures left lots to be desired. Simple, supposedly straightforward procedures like appendectomies often had complications as a result of misdiagnosis. Malignancies and problems like Chrohns disease were often mistakenly treated by an appendectomy and complications like sepsis reared their ugly head. Appendectomies were treated as emergency surgery and middle of the night surgeries always seemed prone to trouble. Foreign body mishaps were not uncommon, and things like suture needles or sponges were the most common thing left behind. The circulating nurse would call out if the sponge count was incorrect, but the surgeon would frequently bellow “It’s not in here we’re closing.” The absolute worst surgical mishap I witnessed was a severing of the phrenic nerve during gall bladder surgery. That’s not common, but so memorable because it initiated a terminal cascade of events. One of the problems I have with aging is the bad things really predominate my memories. Instead of the thousands of people helped, the complications of a few stand out like a graveyard in the back of my head. I tried my very best, but failed a memorable few. Source
