Five compresses and 1 glove forgotten after a hysterectomy. The patient “gave birth” in pain

History of neglect, but exceptional in its importance. A patient who has had her uterus removed (hysterectomy) complains of pain in her stomach and difficulty urinating after the operation. His surgeon finding these usual symptoms (!), In this type of intervention, decides not to try to understand if there is an abnormal reason. No additional examination was therefore carried out.
In her misfortune, this woman is lucky to have a “natural” way out of the elements “forgotten” by the surgeon and, a few days later, in extremely painful contractions, she expels five compresses and a glove vaginally. !
The surgeon was content to apologize… But his patient does not intend to stop there, and has entrusted the justice with the task of sanctioning this inadmissible act… but unfortunately not rare.

Compliance with procedures

Logically, for the compresses, the surgeon must constantly know how many he has used (he has assistants for that) and especially how many he has recovered. Because there is nothing like a compress soaked in blood to disappear in the operating field. In Marseille, it seems that this count has not been done (5 compresses!).
For the glove, it is even more incomprehensible: the surgeons change gloves during the operation, but outside the wound… Unless he inadvertently dropped it… Even less excusable.
This problem is serious enough that very serious surgical journals are publishing articles with specific procedures.
We found one called: “How not to get the wrong site, procedure or patient”. Clearly, the site is the place where the surgeon intervenes; not the room, but the part of your body that it is supposed to repair.
There is therefore a procedure, this is what the normal course of the intervention is called; that is to say that if the surgeon has to tighten the tendon of a finger, and instead he removes the finger: this is called a procedural error …

Wrong patient

As this article says: getting the wrong patient, you will understand, is the big mistake. We thought, wrongly, that these problems were too huge to exist, but that is why doctors decided to write a reference document which in medicine is called a universal consensus adopted by dozens of learned societies. and medical organizations.
We could begin to be reassured … Except that reading this consensus is a little less so, because the first points of this document are frighteningly banal. Like: it is better to operate on the right patient, in the right place and with the right technique… It’s nice to say so. Another precaution: mark the patient … for, I quote: “unambiguously identify the planned site of the incision”.

The anesthesiologist, a key character

It is likely that you will not go to the surgeon who is going to operate on you. He will arrive as soon as you are asleep and ready, allowing him to do several interventions in the same morning. This is why we must insist on a fundamental character during an intervention: the anesthesiologist.
It is he who turns all the lights to green. And he is often, during the intervention, an objective witness to what is happening.

An advice…

Even if it is not specified in the procedure, if one day you have to have an operation, it does not cost anything to ask the one who puts you to sleep to remind him / her why you are there, what for, and above all, where the surgeon counts. plant his scalpel.
If the answers are correct, you can fall asleep reassured.

More and more interventions are videotaped

They are all in the United States, and more and more in France. But make no mistake, it is not for the patient, to explain the procedure to him and provide him with a souvenir, but quite simply because the lawsuits are more and more numerous and to protect the surgeon from a dishonest recourse of his sick.

And it must be recognized that in the United States, crooked law firms had made it their specialty.