Surgeon Removes Man’s Liver By Mistake [Weird News & Oddities]

ACROSS AMERICA — Anyone with surgery planned soon — or who knows someone about to have an operation — may want to skip over the first vignette in Patch’s Weird News & Oddities feature. A surgeon in Sarasota, Florida, cut out a patient’s liver in a type of mistake that happens more often than you may think.

A mistake like that is called a “never event,” in that it should never have happened. In the real world, serious medical errors like that occur about 4,044 times a year in the United States, according to an article by Johns Hopkins Medicine in ScienceDaily.

In the Florida Panhandle, an Alabama man died after the surgeon removed his liver instead of his spleen. And it wasn’t the first time the doctor had taken out the wrong organ. The settlement in that case is confidential.

The patient’s widow said through her lawyer that her husband “died while helpless on the operating table” and that she doesn’t want “anyone else to die due to his incompetence.”

• Read the full story: FL Man Dies After Surgeon Takes Out His Liver By Mistake

‘The Most ‘Florida Thing Ever’

Bobby Ruiz was looking for big snakes when he and others set off on a state-sanctioned hunt to do something about invasive Burmese pythons, indiscriminate eaters that compete with native species for everything in their path in the Florida Everglades.

Ruiz found a snake, but not the quarry of hunters in the Florida Python Challenge, an annual event to cull the herd, as it were. It was a regular snake, hitching a ride on a gator’s back, perhaps unaware it could be a snack waiting to be devoured. Or was it an interspecies friendship, an unlikely safe-swimming buddy system at work?

Or was it, as Ruiz said in the widely circulated video, simply “the most Florida thing ever”?

• Read the full story: ‘Most Florida Thing Ever’: Unlikely Swim Buddies

‘Oh My Darling, Clementine’

A rare orange lobster nicknamed “Clementine” was saved from a seafood tank in a Southampton, New York, grocery store before it could be fished out and cooked in a 4th of July holiday boil and is now exploring Long Island Sound.

The chances of catching an orange lobster like Clementine are about 1 in 30 million. Once spared, she fed on shrimp supplied by store staff and delighted customers until Humane Long Island could reacclimate her to survive in the wild.

Within hours of her release, “Clementine was swimming, foraging, and exploring the Long Island Sound, playfully following us around before disappearing into the ocean depths where she’ll travel as far as 100 miles or more each year,” shelter director John Di Leonardo told Patch.

• Read the full Patch Exclusive: ‘Oh My Darling, Clementine’ Is Free

This Little Piggy Went To Hollywood

Sprinkle, a pig in Connecticut, is having an “it” moment after hot-hoofing it away from her small-town life to Hollywood to film four episodes of Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building.”

Sprinkle is a star in her own right throughout Connecticut and New England. She and three other pigs dubbed the “party pigs” travel with their owners, Michelle Burns and her husband, to put on the charm at schools, senior living centers, birthday parties, baby showers, weddings — you name it.

Sprinkles’ co-stars include Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez, who reportedly “couldn't believe how well behaved Sprinkle was and were impressed of how cool a pig could be.”

• Read the full story: This Little Piggy Went To Hollywood

‘The Shark’ Foiled Again

Stopped in August by lake conditions and hallucinations, a Michigan ultra swimmer known as “The ‘Shark” (top photo) attempted once again to swim across Lake Michigan, a feat he had accomplished in 1998. With the August false start, Jim Dreyer, 61, had failed in three previous attempts since 2023 to cross the fourth-largest freshwater lake in the world.

Make that four.

After 36 hours in the water, Dreyer returned to Grand Haven, Michigan, where he started his planned 82-mile swim to Wisconsin.

• Read the full story: ‘The Shark’ Abandons Swim Across Lake Michigan

How Low Do Thieves Go?

It was bad enough that thieves in Petaluma, California, broke into residents cars overnight and stole money, wallets, IDs, headphones, GPS devices and other items. At was worse when one of them got a hold of a garage door opener and rifled through cabinets for more loot.

But Snowy? That’s low.

Snowy is a little girl’s pet bunny. Snowy was in the rabbit hutch, and video shows two thieves removing the animal.

• Read the full story: Snowy The Bunny Targeted By Thieves

What Do 1,500 Dolphins Look Like?

Seeing a large school of dolphins, or a single dolphin, is one of the rewards of hanging out in the sea. But what about a megapod of at least 1,500 dolphins?

Travelers aboard a Dana Wharf Sportsfishing and Whale Watching vessel were treated to the sight off the coast of south San Clemente.

The long-beaked common dolphins “stretched out for about a mile racing toward us,” Dana Wharf COO Donna Kalez told Patch. “Truly amazing sight — especially for our first-time whale watchers.”

• Read the full Patch Exclusive and watch the video: Megapod Of 1,500 Dolphins Put On A Show

More Weird

• ICYMI: Loud Fish Sex; Granny’s Ashes At Disney: Best Of Weird News & Oddities