Toulouse surgeons discovered that their patient had been living with a compress in his chest for 27 years, which had caused him serious health problems.
This exceptional case was reported in the the Journal of Respiratory Diseases and spotted by The world. Dhe surgeons at the Larray Hospital of the Toulouse University Hospital discovered a compress forgotten 27 years earlier in a patient’s chest.
bloody coughs
It all started in 1989. Victim of two cardiac arrests and presenting a coronary disease with insufficient oxygen supply to the heart, he was asked an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD), which is used to restore normal heart rhythm in the event of ventricular fibrillation.
Eighteen years later, he spits blood and passes several examinations until 2015. A lesion in part of the left lung is spotted, but no sign of cancer. In 2016, the patient was hospitalized because of a new cough bringing blood from the respiratory tract. Doctors re-diagnose blood in the lungs and step up procedures to stop the bleeding. But the patient relapses each time.
The doctors then decided to operate on him to remove the damaged part of his lung. What they discover is astonishing: an abscess containing a piece of textile, a compress forgotten 27 years earlier near the ICD pericardial plates. At the bottom of the abscess, the surgeons notice that the bronchi lead directly to small veins, which explains why the patient was the victim of bloody coughs. The man, still on anticoagulant treatment, finally returned home five days after this surprising operation.
Similar stories
Several similar cases have already been reported. Last January, a patient who had her uterus removed and suffered from persistent pain discovered that the surgeon had forgotten five compresses and a glove inside her body. In May, the Caen University Hospital was ordered to pay 4,000 euros to a patient in her sixties who had spent twelve years with a catheter forgotten in her body following an operation. In 2017, a patient discovered that the pain he had been feeling for 7 years and because of which he had multiplied the examinations was in fact caused by a 25 cm tube forgotten in his body during an operation.
.
