Surgeons in France mistakenly remove man’s healthy kidney instead of diseased one

French surgeons wrongly removed a healthy kidney from a cancer patient, leaving the elderly man with just one of the blood-cleaning organs—which is diseased, the Daily Mail writes.

Radio France reported that in July of this year, a 77-year-old man underwent an oncology procedure at Henri Mondor Hospital in Créteil, near Paris. When he came round from the kidney removal—a medical procedure called a nephrectomy, which can take between one and four hours—he discovered that the doctors had operated on the incorrect side.

This happened, local media reports, despite him correctly filling in the ‘checklist’ done by medical staff before the surgery.

While the patient’s life is not in danger, he is faced with the consequences of the medical error.