My mother-in-law is a retired radiologist, and only recently she told us a story about her biggest “mistake” as a doctor.
One of her patients suffered from severe pain in one of his collarbones, and he needed a series of medical images be taken to see what was going on. When she was making the images, my mother-in-law slipped and accidentally made images of one of the patient’s lungs.
Before deleting the images — which many radiologists unfortunately do with flawed images before even looking at them — she peeped at one of the images without thinking, and noticed a large dark mass in the lung. A lung tumor the size of a plum — this patient had been suffering from lung cancer without knowing it !
The tumor was operable, and the cancer hadn’t spread yet — and in the end, after surgery and chemo, the patient was declared to be in complete remission.
If my mother-in-law hadn’t slipped, if she hadn’t taken the accidental images of his lung and taken a quick peek, the cancer would almost surely have been detected in a more advanced stage which would have destroyed his future.
But she did.