MEDICAL UPDATE

Whoops.

(Thanks to Jason Easterday)

Comments

[looney girl]

First post :-)
Key quote: "We have put this down to human error."
Ya think?!?!?!

[Gregg]

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!"

[katykat]

i loved: "in 4,000 surgeries, this is the first time this has ever happened."
I should hope so.

[John Kerry]

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!***

[BarryFS]

"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?

[Jessica]

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.

[looney girl]

You make excellent points Jessica- I had not thought this thru very well! Guess I was jsut anxious to post first haha.

[BMX3]

"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?

[looney girl]

I wonder if one of those those missing parts and/or rods were the cause of Subservient Chicken?

[Con]

*smacks forhead with palm*

THAT'S where I left them!

[crash]

She lucky they were scissors, as opposed to radioactive pencils.

[crash]

She's*

[daisyj]

"we couldn't explain how a pair of 6.7-inch scissors was left in her abdomen"

What kind of explainations did they try?

[Jeff Meyerson]

"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.

[BarryFSb]

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.

[barbiguinness]

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.

[MOTW]

"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.

[JCT]

Jessica - Good point! Either than or she had pica, the eating disorder where a person craves non-food items.

[sadie]

"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.

[sadie]

please remove the "s" from "motives" in the previous post, I got distracted and grammar dumb.

[wayne]

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.

[Citry Peough]

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?

[alex]

Sew what?