MEDICAL UPDATE
(Thanks to Jason Easterday)
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(Thanks to Jason Easterday)
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First post :-)
Key quote: "We have put this down to human error."
Ya think?!?!?!
Posted by: looney girl | April 22, 2004 at 11:46 AM
Saw this on the news the other day. I hope she sues the heck out of them.
"No house in the hills and luxury cars for you!"
Posted by: Gregg | April 22, 2004 at 11:46 AM
i loved: "in 4,000 surgeries, this is the first time this has ever happened."
I should hope so.
Posted by: katykat | April 22, 2004 at 11:50 AM
I am completely for protecting people from hardware being left in their bodies, as well as protecting the poor doctors who mistakenly do this. I actually voted this way the last time I was at my senate job, back about 17 months ago.
**FRANCE citizens for JFK!***
Posted by: John Kerry | April 22, 2004 at 11:52 AM
"We have put this down to human error. I've been executive director here for four years, and in that time we've done something like 40,000 operations and this is the first time this incident has occurred."
Good to know. What did they lose inside patients the other 40,000 times?
Posted by: BarryFS | April 22, 2004 at 11:52 AM
Typical men, dropping their tools right where they finished using them, and then forgetting where they put them. Then when the woman complains, they ignore her!
I think that this woman is lucky to be alive. Imagine how sharp surgical scissors must be. Every move could create a new injury.
What if they hadn't found them, and she had died and been buried. Then someday an archeologist would find her body and think that we ate scissors as some sort of weird ritual.
Posted by: Jessica | April 22, 2004 at 11:54 AM
You make excellent points Jessica- I had not thought this thru very well! Guess I was jsut anxious to post first haha.
Posted by: looney girl | April 22, 2004 at 11:56 AM
"Eventually, she demanded doctors x-ray her abdomen. They did and discovered the 6.7-inch pair of scissors, which were removed in October 2002".
Are we banking new stories now and bringing them out on slow days??? Did it take her almost two years to decide to sue the hospital? Does anyone else find this timeline a little odd?
Posted by: BMX3 | April 22, 2004 at 12:04 PM
I wonder if one of those those missing parts and/or rods were the cause of Subservient Chicken?
Posted by: looney girl | April 22, 2004 at 12:05 PM
*smacks forhead with palm*
THAT'S where I left them!
Posted by: Con | April 22, 2004 at 12:05 PM
She lucky they were scissors, as opposed to radioactive pencils.
Posted by: crash | April 22, 2004 at 12:47 PM
She's*
Posted by: crash | April 22, 2004 at 12:48 PM
"we couldn't explain how a pair of 6.7-inch scissors was left in her abdomen"
What kind of explainations did they try?
Posted by: daisyj | April 22, 2004 at 01:20 PM
"It shows the system works. It just doesn't work perfectly." My nominee for Understatement of the Year if she really thinks 1500 patients is an acceptable number to leave your instruments in.
BMX3: It apparently took her 18 months to get an x-ray, which just shows the difference between Australia and the U.S. I guess. Also, the fact that another article said she is "considering legal action" proves she's no American.
I guess she would have gotten faster action had the guy overdone it at the salad bar.
Posted by: Jeff Meyerson | April 22, 2004 at 02:49 PM
Here in Canada, hospital screw-ups kill a number higher than 20,000 every year, 3 times what cigarettes kill assuming that non-smokers never die. Nothing is being done about it.
Posted by: BarryFSb | April 22, 2004 at 03:06 PM
In human operating rooms, the nurse or surgical assistants are responsible for counting every sponge before and after surgery to make sure they are all accounted for. If a sponge is missing, they have to either find it or open the patient back up. (In case someone doesn't know, when they say "sponge", they're usually talking about a very small gauze square.) This mistake was probably blamed on the nurse too. From what I've heard (and do not doubt one bit), the doctors make no attempt to make this job any easier for the nurses, and just leave the sponges and instruments laying wherever.
I'm not a nurse, so this is all secondhand. But if you ask any nurse who has assisted in surgeries you'll probably hear the same thing.
Posted by: barbiguinness | April 22, 2004 at 07:01 PM
"Most patients needed additional surgery to remove the object, but sometimes it came out by itself or in a doctor's office. In other cases, patients were not even aware of the object, and it turned up in later surgery for other problems.
"The study found that emergency operations are nine times more likely to lead to such mistakes, and operating-room complications requiring a change in procedure are four times more likely."
Well, I guess as long as you're not having emergency surgery the first go round, and you plan on having surgery a short time later, anything lodged in a handy body cavity will eventually be found or come out.
I feel SO much better now.
Posted by: MOTW | April 23, 2004 at 03:45 AM
Jessica - Good point! Either than or she had pica, the eating disorder where a person craves non-food items.
Posted by: JCT | April 23, 2004 at 05:11 AM
"John Kerry",
FYI: One can protect both the patients and the doctors at the same time. If you are not aware how this is possible I certainly won't explain it to you.
Besides, I suspect the motives behind your post was to introduce a level of political rhetoric unsuitable and, quite frankly, remedial for this particular blog.
Posted by: sadie | April 23, 2004 at 09:25 AM
please remove the "s" from "motives" in the previous post, I got distracted and grammar dumb.
Posted by: sadie | April 23, 2004 at 09:46 AM
traumatized?
snore.
she'd probably never have known they were there had they not counted the tools and then gone looking for it.
get over it.
Posted by: wayne | April 23, 2004 at 03:03 PM
The article says that now that the scissors have been recovered, the lady plans to sue. Could this be a misprint? Maybe she plans to SEW?
Posted by: Citry Peough | April 24, 2004 at 06:19 AM
Sew what?
Posted by: alex | April 24, 2004 at 07:19 AM