Surgery Error Leaves Woman Without Both Legs

Doctor using tablet beside hospital patient — Photo: Pressmaster / Shutterstock

When a wrong-site surgery happens, it is not a mystery of medicine but a collapse of routine defenses; the Sharon Jacks lawsuit alleges precisely that sequence—a cascade of missed checks that ended with the amputation of the wrong leg, followed by removal of the intended leg, leaving a double amputee.

At a Glance

A 32-page complaint alleges surgeons amputated Jacks’s left leg when the right was the intended site, then later removed the right leg as well.
Plaintiff’s counsel says the correct (right) leg was marked preoperatively and that mark remained after the wrong leg was removed.
The filing states two surgical timeouts occurred yet failed to stop the error; the team prepared and tourniqueted the wrong limb.
Hospital statements reported in local media acknowledge procedural failures and staff dismissals following an avoidable event.

What the complaint alleges—and why it matters

The Washington County case centers on a clear, high-stakes assertion: Jacks consented to a right-leg amputation; the surgical team instead removed her left leg in September 2025. Multiple outlets summarizing the 32-page complaint report that her right leg—apparently the intended operative site—was later amputated as well, rendering her a double amputee. The lawsuit names the hospital, the operating surgeon, and other team members, seeks compensatory and punitive damages, and describes permanent disability, pain and suffering, and emotional distress.

In on-record statements, plaintiff’s attorney Brad Lane says the surgeon had correctly marked the right leg before surgery, and that the mark remained visible on the right side after the left was removed. The complaint also alleges not one but two surgical “timeouts”—the standardized pause to verify patient identity, procedure, and site—occurred before incision, yet the team still prepared, draped, and placed a pneumatic tourniquet on the wrong limb. Those steps, if misdirected, represent multiple decision points at which a standard cross-check should have caught the error. Local reporting adds that the hospital characterized the event as avoidable, said expected OR procedures were not followed, and stated that involved staff were no longer in their positions.

Wrong-site surgery: rare, feared, and almost always preventable

Wrong-site surgery—wrong patient, wrong procedure, wrong side—is classed as a “never event”: incidents that should not occur if robust systems are in place. On a per-operation basis, it remains uncommon; a seminal estimate places incidence around one in 112,000 operations, infrequent enough that a typical hospital may see one such event every five to ten years. Yet rarity does not equal mystery. When these cases do occur, root causes concentrate in a familiar bundle: failures to follow protocol, inconsistent documentation, miscommunication among team members, and breakdowns in the pre-incision verification process.

That pattern is echoed across safety bodies and reviews. The Joint Commission’s sentinel event reporting has long listed wrong-site surgery among the most frequently cited catastrophic errors, and professional analyses consistently track protocol lapses and communication gaps as leading contributors. The reason the category commands outsized attention is simple: the harm is immediate and often irreversible; the defenses, by contrast, are knowable, teachable, and auditable.

How the defenses are supposed to work—and where they fail

Modern perioperative safety relies on redundancy. Preoperative consent and documentation specify site and side; the surgeon performs site marking on the skin with an unambiguous notation that survives prepping. The surgical team conducts a formal timeout with active participation from all members—anesthesia, nursing, and surgery—verifying identity, procedure, and site aloud before incision. For limb surgery, the extremity is positioned, prepped, and draped so the mark remains visible; placement of a tourniquet or incision cannot proceed until the team confirms the match between the mark, the consent, and the plan.

When wrong-site surgeries occur, investigations commonly find more than one breach: incomplete or perfunctory timeouts, documentation inconsistencies never reconciled, marks that are obscured by drapes, or a deference dynamic in which juniors hesitate to challenge seniors even when they see a discrepancy. That is why checklists are necessary but not sufficient—the culture has to reward the interruption. The allegations in the Jacks filing, if borne out, would map onto precisely these failure modes: a correct mark not acted upon; timeouts that did not interrupt an error trajectory; and equipment placement (the tourniquet) on the incorrect limb without triggering a stop-the-line response.

What the hospital’s statements add

Public statements reported by local outlets are concise but important. Selby General Hospital acknowledged an adverse surgical event, described it as avoidable, said expected operating-room procedures were not followed, and stated that involved staff were no longer in their roles; it also referenced protocol reviews by external leaders, including Mayo Clinic and the state health department. Such acknowledgments are notable because they locate the failure inside process noncompliance rather than unforeseeable complication. They also align with the broader safety literature’s finding that following established protocols—meticulously, every time—remains the most reliable defense against wrong-site events.

The legal frame: identifiable defendants and claimed damages

The complaint’s posture is conventional for a catastrophic never event: identify the institutions and practitioners responsible for perioperative safety, allege negligence via specific protocol failures, and seek both compensatory damages for lifelong disability and punitive damages aimed at deterrence. Suits of this type often hinge less on proving harm—wrong-site amputations speak for themselves—and more on tracing where the safety chain broke. Depositions and discovery typically examine consent forms, pre-op notes, site-marking documentation, timeout records, anesthesia charts, circulating nurse notes, and any photographic evidence of markings. Electronic health record audit logs can help reconstruct the exact sequence of checks relative to incision time.

Jacks’s case adds the devastating coda reported by multiple outlets: the right leg, the originally intended target, was later amputated as well. That fact magnifies damages on two fronts: functional loss (from unilateral to bilateral amputation) and the psychological trauma of an avoidable first loss compounded by a necessary second. Courts and mediators in such cases weigh lifetime care needs, prosthetics and adaptations, home modifications, caregiving burdens, and pain and suffering—comprehensively, not in fragments.

Lessons for hospitals and surgical teams

Hospitals do not need new science to prevent wrong-site surgery; they need disciplined execution of the science they already have. The evidence base points to a few nonnegotiables. First, make the mark matter: use durable, unambiguous, surgeon-placed markings that remain visible after prepping and draping. Second, run the timeout as a true safety huddle, not a recital—require each discipline to verify the site against the consent and the visible mark, and empower any member to halt progression until discrepancies are resolved. Third, design the workflow so that an incorrect step is hard to make and easy to detect; for example, tourniquet placement should be gated by visible confirmation of the mark and cross-check of documents. Finally, train for voice and culture: teach juniors and nonphysician staff how to challenge, and teach surgeons how to invite and reward that challenge.

The Joint Commission, WHO, AHRQ, and professional colleges have produced checklists, primers, and advisories detailing these steps, and their analyses repeatedly show communication and protocol-adherence lapses as predominant contributors to wrong-site events. Rarity is no defense; preparedness is the obligation.

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

What to watch as the case proceeds

As litigation moves forward, expect the record to clarify the timeline: the consent and indications for the right-leg procedure, the timing and content of site marking, who participated in each timeout, how the limb was prepped and draped, and what triggered recognition of error. Hospital internal reviews—often conducted under quality-assurance privilege—may never be public in full, but externally verifiable artifacts such as OR checklists, anesthesia logs, and EHR audit trails typically surface in discovery. For the public and for peer institutions, the most constructive outcome is not only accountability but also a durable fix: protocols translated into practice, supported by training, audit, and a culture that prizes the lifesaving inconvenience of stopping the line.