xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
Children’s Hospital of Orange County (Calif.) announced new rules to guard against wrong-site surgery after a January incident in which doctors opened up the wrong side of a child’s skull to remove a brain tumor, only to realize, after finding no such tumor, that it was on the other side. (According to the surgeons, they merely sewed up the first site and proceeded to the correct side, without complication.)
Dr. Mary Ellen Beatty was suspended and fined $20,000 by the Florida Board of Medicine in April for a wrong-finger surgery, her third wrong-site error in five years.
An unnamed man in his 80s, whom neighbors said “hated everybody,” was killed in Downey, Calif., in January after attempting revenge by putting an explosive in a neighbor’s home but accidentally setting his arm on fire, which then set off his bomb.
A 49-year-old woman died in a fire in Milwaukee in January when, trying to get her boyfriend’s attention, she stood angrily beside his bed and flicked lit matches onto his sheet-clad body, until a fire started. She was eventually overcome with smoke, but the boyfriend and the five others in the house survived.
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or [email protected] or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.) NEWS OF THE WEIRD
