Sharon Jacks, a 74-year-old Army veteran from Meigs County, Ohio, went into Selby General Hospital in Marietta last September for a planned below-the-knee amputation of her right leg — part of a treatment plan for squamous cell carcinoma. She came out missing her left leg instead. Four months later, doctors at a different hospital removed the correct leg, leaving Jacks a double amputee. The 32-page complaint filed in Washington County court names nine defendants, including the hospital and Jacks' surgical team. The charges: gross negligence, battery, and reckless conduct. The lawsuit alleges defendants acted "willfully, wantonly, recklessly, maliciously, and with conscious disregard for the substantial certainty of catastrophic injury." Jacks consented only to surgery on her right lower extremity. She never consented to amputation of her left leg. What makes this case structurally damning rather than merely tragic is the timeline of failures. Medical records show the surgical team conducted two "time-outs" before the procedure — the standardized pauses specifically designed to confirm patient identity, planned procedure, and correct surgical site. Both time-outs failed to catch the error. The lawsuit calls this "a complete failure of basic safety procedures." Wrong-site surgery is among the most tracked and theoretically preventable errors in modern medicine. The Joint Commission's Universal Protocol, adopted nationally after a wave of wrong-site cases in the early 2000s, mandates pre-procedure verification, surgical site marking, and time-out procedures. Selby General's own statement to WBNS-TV acknowledged that "expected operating room procedures were not followed" and called it "an avoidable event." The hospital said those involved "were held accountable for their actions and are no longer in their positions." That framing — individual accountability for systemic failure — is itself revealing. When two separate safety checkpoints fail to catch an error as binary as left-versus-right, the problem is not one distracted nurse or one careless surgeon. It is an institutional culture where checklists became performative rather than functional. Selby General is a small rural hospital in Washington County. Rural facilities face chronic staffing shortages, resource constraints, and lower case volumes that can erode the muscle memory of safety protocols. None of this excuses wrong-site surgery, but it contextualizes the institutional fragility. The question the lawsuit forces is whether Selby General had the systems, training, and culture to safely perform the procedure at all. The lawsuit seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages. Whatever the financial outcome, the case will likely become a reference point in patient safety litigation — a worst-case demonstration of what happens when surgical checklists exist on paper but not in practice.
