20 cm catheter in the spine, compress in the back, sponge in the skull, cotton drape in the abdomen … Medical errors of this kind are more numerous than you might think.
The Caen University Hospital was ordered to pay 4,000 euros to a patient in her sixties who spent twelve years with a catheter left in her body following an operation. As the story goes West France, this woman had an operation in 2006 for a runny nose which had required the installation of a drainage, carried out with a catheter of 20 cm in the lumbar spine (part of the spine, Editor’s note). At the end of the operation, the nursing staff forgot to remove the catheter. The sexagenarian has lived for twelve years with this foreign body without knowing it.
4000 euros in damages
Today, the complainant is said to be suffering from conversion disorder, a condition during which she has neurological symptoms such as paresthesia, blindness, paralysis or other similar deficits without damage to the central or peripheral nervous system. The complainant’s lawyer had based her defense on the psychological consequences of the presence of the catheter and claimed 32,000 euros.
A request that the administrative court of Caen had partially heard at first instance, awarding him 4000 euros in damages. The Nantes administrative court of appeal followed this decision, considering like its predecessor that “the organic origin of psychological disorders has not been established”.
These medical errors discovered 20 years later
Compress in the back, sponge in the skull, cotton drape woven in the abdomen … This is not the first time that a medical team has forgotten equipment in the body of a patient. In 2010, Moroccan doctors discovered a compress lodged between the muscles surrounding the lumbar vertebrae of a woman operated on three years earlier for a herniated disc. In Brazil, a patient kept her forgotten compresses 37 years earlier when her gallbladder was removed. At Morocco, a neurosurgeon even forgot a piece of compress in the skull of a patient operated on for a tumor three years earlier.
In February 2017, Japanese surgeons reported the case of an anemic woman 67-year-old with an emission of blood through the anus in the Clinical Journal of Gastroenterology. As the scan appeared to show the presence of a 6cm tumor, doctors discovered that it was actually a woven cotton field forgotten during a procedure performed 24 years earlier. According to Urology Case Reports another woman also lived for 29 years with a cotton-woven drape that was forgotten during a Caesarean section.
Last January, a patient accused a Marseille surgeon of having forgotten 5 compresses and a glove in her body, during a hysterectomy (removal of the uterus) that she would have expelled 5 days later. Logically, the surgeon must constantly know how many compresses he has used and above all, how many he has recovered. Respect for procedures is very important in an operating theater. It also happens that the surgeon makes the wrong case or patient. A word of advice: it does not cost anything to ask the person who puts you to sleep to remind him / her why you are there, what to do, and above all, where the surgeon intends to stick his scalpel. If the answers are correct, you can fall asleep reassured.
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