Hard cataract or heart attack: A tragic miscommunication recipe!

Miscommunication arises when interacting members connect, but one or more of its members in the communication chain does not fully understand what has been conveyed. This can happen for a variety of reasons, including the initiator's inappropriate word selection, existence of communication barrier between the initiator and receiver, the receiver's misperception, and less frequently, the receiver being “off-target” to the communication chain. This case involves a 54-year-old woman with no known comorbid conditions who experienced an acute panic attack just before the start of scheduled cataract surgery, which was managed with abandonment of surgery followed by monitoring and treatment in the intensive care, conducting the departmental root cause analysis, and subsequent performance of uneventful surgery with satisfactory outcome after addressing the root cause.