18 months after the surgery, the woman was suffering from abdominal pain, the scan showed something like this…

Wellington. If you have watched Jaspal Bhatti’s flop show, you may remember the episode in which a doctor operates on a man to cure his stomach pain. The doctor’s watch is then lost. After some time, when the man again complained of stomach pain, it was discovered that the doctor had left his watch in his stomach. Jaspal Bhatti may have said this in sarcasm many years ago, but a similar incident has happened in reality.

In fact, a woman in New Zealand had a device left in her stomach during abdominal surgery. This tool (retractor) is used to hold open surgical wounds. The woman had undergone a caesarean section i.e. C-section (surgery to deliver a baby) about 18 months ago. In fact, her retractors were not removed until 18 months after delivery.

In the stomach was a device about the size of a dinner plate.
According to the report, the woman had been suffering from severe pain for 18 months and a CT scan revealed that retractors the size of dinner plates were present in her abdomen. Health regulators have called it a public hospital failure. According to NDTV, Department of Health and Disability Commissioner Morag McDowell said, “It is clear that the care provided was poor, as the (retractor) was not identified during any routine surgical examination. Due to which it remained inside the woman’s stomach. “The staff involved did not have any definitive answers as to how the retractor ended up in the stomach, or why it was not identified before it was closed,” he said.

Retractors are widely used in surgery
This tool is the Alexis wound guard-retractor which is widely used during surgery. A team of surgeons at Auckland City Hospital replaced the first Alexis wound retractor with a larger retractor, but the second retractor was inadvertently left in the woman’s abdomen, the commissioner’s report said.

Such an incident happened twice in two years
The retractor was not captured by X-ray because it was a “non-radiopaque item”. Later it came to know when a CT scan was done. According to the commissioner, this is the second time in two years that a medical device has been left inside a patient at an Auckland hospital.

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Tags: Health facilities, New Zealand