An almost thirty-something compress … in the chest of a patient. It is a more than unusual discovery made by the doctors of the Larrey hospital of the Toulouse University Hospital. They discovered a compress left on 27 years earlier after surgery. This exceptional case is reported in the Revue des Maladies Respiratoires and relayed by the Biomedical Realities blog, hosted by Le Monde.
The man on whom this discovery is a 65-year-old former smoker who suffers from coronary disease with a heart failure as well as a heart rhythm disorder “requiring anticoagulant therapy to avoid the risk ofpulmonary embolism“, reports Le Monde.
In 1989, the man had a automatic defibrillator after two cardiac arrests.
Many years later, in 2007, he began to cough up blood. This sputum of blood from the respiratory tract (hemoptysis) is multiplying so that the patient needs to be hospitalized in 2016.
173 forgotten foreign bodies
Examinations fail to get doctors to understand the cause of these recurrent coughs. There remains one solution: a surgical intervention. When opening the chest, surgeons come across an abscess that contains a compress. Bronchi open directly into small veins at the bottom of the abscess, explaining the hemoptysis from which the patient was suffering. Doctors understand that the compress was forgotten during the patient’s first surgery. The latter was able to leave the hospital five days later with anticoagulant treatment.
In France, between 2003 and 2016, 173 foreign bodies were forgotten in the body of patients out of the 266,070 thoracic operations according to the ‘epidemiology in thoracic surgery’ database (Epithor) of the French Society of Thoracic Surgery cited by Le Monde.
This case is reminiscent of a precedent. 48-year-old woman who had a hysterectomy (removal of the uterus) in April 2018 sued her surgeon for forgetting after surgery a glove and five compresses in her belly.
