Personal Injury Advocate
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Did something go wrong during your surgery?

Trusting a surgical team is already hard. Finding out something went wrong during the operation itself is worse.

Are you in an emergency right now?

  • Call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room if you have severe pain, fever, bleeding, or trouble breathing.
  • Get medical care even if your symptoms seem mild. Some surgical complications take days to show up.
  • This page is for after you are safe.

This page covers surgical error claims and what to do right now. We are the injured person's advocate. We connect you with a lawyer who handles cases like yours, so you get the full settlement your recovery deserves. Always free. Talk to an advocate. We usually reply within minutes, at most one business day.

A surgical error is a type of medical harm that happens during an operation: the wrong body part, the wrong procedure, a tool left inside a patient, or damage to a nearby organ. Health researchers call the most serious surgical mistakes "never events", meaning events that should never happen with correct procedure. A review of paid never-event claims found that wrong-site surgery carried a permanent injury rate above 40%, with an average liability payment over $127,000 (American College of Surgeons Bulletin).

What real surgical error cases have paid

These are publicly reported results. They show how widely serious cases vary. They are examples only, and we are not a law firm. No one can promise or predict what any case is worth, and many cases resolve for far less.

We are not a law firm and this is not legal advice. The point of these numbers is simpler: a surgical error can carry real, lasting costs, and the system can account for them when a case is handled well.

Talk to an advocate. You do not have to sort out what went wrong on your own.

What to do in the first days

  1. Get a second opinion from a different medical provider if you are not comfortable returning to the same team.
  2. Talk to an advocate at WeHelpInjured. It is free.
  3. Request your complete surgical records in writing, including the operative report, consent form, and any imaging taken afterward.
  4. Write down your symptoms and when they started, in as much detail as you can.
  5. Remember that a signed consent form covers known risks of the procedure, not surgical errors like wrong-site surgery or a retained instrument.
  6. Warning: don't wait! Your filing deadline is a trap, and waiting too long can end your claim. Deadlines vary by state, and medical claims can carry a shorter, different clock than a standard injury claim. Find your state on our state pages now.
  7. Never give a recorded statement to an insurance company, even your own. Talk to your advocate first.

What we can help with

All of it is free to you. We never take money from injured people.

Talk to an advocate. You trusted your surgical team. If that trust was broken, let us help you find the right next step.

Sources