Florida surgeon who removed wrong organ says he is ‘forever traumatized’ by patient’s death

( NBC )

Over the course of an eight-hour deposition, Florida surgeon Thomas Shaknovsky faced the same question again and again: Why did he remove a man’s liver instead of his spleen?

The disastrous August 2024 surgical error and death of Shaknovsky’s patient, 70-year-old William Bryan, on the operating table prompted Bryan’s widow to file a lawsuit last year and a grand jury to indict Shaknovsky on a manslaughter charge last month. He has pleaded not guilty.

Exactly what went wrong during the planned splenectomy has remained a mystery — especially since Shaknovsky has not spoken publicly about the case.

A deposition Shaknovsky gave in November as part of the lawsuit offers his first detailed, emotional account of the operation. Shaknovsky said there were unusual factors that made Bryan’s procedure more difficult. And he described the profound toll of losing a patient, saying he broke down in tears afterward.

“That was an incredibly unfortunate event that I regret deeply, and I’m forever traumatized by it and hurt by it,” he said, according to a transcript of the deposition shared with NBC News by attorney Joe Zarzaur, who represents Bryan’s widow, Beverly Bryan.

Wrong-site surgeries can occur “during difficult circumstances,” Shaknovsky said, which in this case included blood in Bryan’s abdomen and an enlarged colon obstructing Shaknovsky’s view of other organs.

Shaknovsky said that while he was trying to get a better view as the operation was underway, Bryan started bleeding profusely, causing his heart to stop. As the operating room team did chest compressions, Shaknovsky said, he desperately tried to find the source of the bleeding. It was during that chaotic time that he accidentally removed Bryan’s liver rather than his spleen.

Shaknovsky then instructed a nurse to label the organ he removed as a spleen — which typically weighs less than 15% of a liver.

“I can’t explain to you what it’s like for a surgeon to lose a patient on a table and how demoralizing it is and how devastating it is. And I couldn’t tell the difference because I was so upset,” Shaknovsky said of mixing up the organs.

“It’s a devastating thing, which I will have to live with the rest of my life,” he said in the transcript, which is about 400 pages long, “and I think about it every single day.”

Prosecutors have not offered a detailed timeline of how the surgery unfolded. A medical examiner determined Bryan died of “exsanguination,” or bleeding to death, and “surgical removal of the liver,” according to his death certificate.

An attorney representing Shaknovsky in his criminal case did not respond to an inquiry from NBC News. Shaknovsky’s attorney in Bryan’s lawsuit said neither he nor Shaknovsky could comment on the deposition because of the ongoing litigation.

The lawsuit also names Shaknovsky’s former private practice as a defendant. Shaknovsky and the practice have denied intentional wrongdoing in court filings.

Bryan, a veteran from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, had been visiting Florida with his wife when he began experiencing pain on his left side, according to Beverly Bryan’s lawsuit. The couple went to Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast in Miramar Beach, where, according to the lawsuit, Shaknovsky convinced them that Bryan urgently needed a splenectomy, despite the couple’s wanting to return home to Alabama.

A spokesperson for Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast, the hospital where the operation took place, said in a statement last month that Shaknovsky was not employed directly by the health system and that he has not practiced at any of its facilities since August 2024. The statement added that safety is the hospital’s top priority.

In his deposition, Shaknovsky said that he had met briefly with Bryan several times in the days leading up to the surgery and that they had connected over a shared love of Alabama college football. He described praying with the Bryans before the operation began.

Once they were in the operating room, however, the procedure did not go as planned. Shaknovsky said that Bryan began bleeding heavily and that he could not figure out where the blood was coming from.

“It was like a overflown sink that’s clogged up, and I am looking for a fork at the bottom, trying to feel and find the bleed, and I was not able to do so,” he said, according to the deposition. “After 20 minutes of struggling, desperately trying to save his life, that’s when the wrong-site event took place.”

The spleen is nestled under the ribs on the left side of the body, while the liver is anchored under the right side of the ribs. Asked repeatedly by Zarzaur, the attorney, during his deposition how he could have taken out the wrong organ, Shaknovsky said he expected Bryan’s diseased spleen would be “double the size of what is normal” because it had a mass on it — though Beverly Bryan’s lawsuit says the medical examiner later told her that Bryan’s spleen was anatomically “nearly normal.”

Shaknovsky insisted the error was not due to a lack of anatomical understanding: He said he learned the difference between a spleen and a liver early — “in junior high, probably during science class.”

After efforts to resuscitate Bryan failed, Shaknovsky said, he went to the hospital’s medical library, bereft.

“It’s a quiet place, and I went there — I went there to cry because I was devastated,” he said. “I didn’t want the staff to see me like that.”

Shaknovsky said that as he wrote up the postoperative note for Bryan, which misidentified the removed organ as a spleen, he found himself “mentally compromised.” Asked what he meant by that, he said, “devastated, demoralized, crying over his passing, felt that I failed him.”

Beverly Bryan’s suit accuses Shaknovsky of medical malpractice and says he “wrongfully omitted any reference to Mr. Bryan’s liver being removed in order to ‘cover up’ his gross negligence/recklessness and to hopefully avoid the embarrassment due to such derelict care.”

Bryan’s death is not the first allegation of medical malpractice that Shaknovsky has faced. In May 2023, he was alleged to have removed part of a patient’s pancreas instead of his adrenal gland, according to a claim with the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation. The patient survived, and the case was settled out of court. Months later, Shaknovsky was alleged to have failed to recognize signs of sepsis after abdominal surgery, leading to a woman’s death in August 2023, according to an ongoing lawsuit her son filed in October 2025.

Shaknovsky, a doctor of osteopathic medicine, had been licensed to practice in several states. After Bryan’s death, he lost his licenses in Florida, Alabama and New York.

Following his indictment last month in connection with Bryan’s death, Shaknovsky was arrested in Miramar Beach while he was working as a Lyft driver. Body camera video of his arrest obtained by NBC News showed armed deputies swarming around Shaknovsky, who had two passengers in the back seat when he was apprehended.