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Dr Gérald Kierzek (Medical Director of Doctissimo)
In Colombia, a woman who had been in constant pain for 11 years discovered through an MRI that thread and a surgical needle had been in her body from a tubal ligation. Is such an error possible in France? Response from Dr Gérald Kierzek, emergency physician and medical director of Doctissimo.
She had been living in hell for 4,000 days, according to information from the New York Post. A 39-year-old woman from a village in Colombia, discovered during extensive medical examinations that thread and a needle were inside her lower abdomen, causing severe pain for all these years.
Needle and thread left behind during tubal ligation
Maria Aderlinda Forero had undergone a fallopian tube ligation just after the birth of her fourth child in 2012. At the time, a pain is quickly felt, which she then attributes to typical postpartum pain. Months pass, the pain remains. But the medical appointments do not relieve her: after systematic prescriptions of paracetamol, the doctors switch to more powerful analgesics, when Maria Aderlinda Forero indicates that she has difficulty working and sleeping. Nothing works. It was not until 10 years later that an MRI and an ultrasound made it possible to target the problem and discovered a cause in which the patient found it hard to believe:
“They told me that in surgery they left me a needle with thread in my stomach”,
From now on, the young woman is waiting for a new intervention to put an end to these pains and remove the elements that have nothing to do in her body. “What I need is for them to operate quickly, to remove this because I don’t want to die and leave my children”, concludes moved, the woman in pain. Contacted by the patient, the stunned surgeon does not recognize the error, and affirms that the patient had to swallow thread and a needle herself.
Forgetting equipment: what security in the blocks today?
If the stories of forgetting compresses, equipment in the body of an operated patient always have their little effect, we asked the question of safety in an operating room to Dr. Gérald Kierzek, emergency physician, anesthetist-resuscitator and medical director Doctissimo . What is the procedure in France to avoid an accident?
“In France, there is a safety procedure established by the HAS in 2010, which is called the safety checklists in the operating room, which intervene before, during and after the intervention, both on the anesthesia side and on the surgery side. , this involves counting all threads, compresses instruments, with a final count, made by the scrub nurse, an operating theater nurse (IBODE) or the operating assistant.us use ‘radiopaque’ equipment. Which means that at the slightest doubt about the count, or in case of pain, an X-ray can inform us and quickly eliminate the doubt.
A framework that is now secure, even if the human factor does not completely eradicate the possibility of an error:
“The problem today is mainly based on staff turnover, organizational constraints, teams that are not used to working together… All these constraints that weigh on caregivers today unfortunately play on safety. This is one of the consequences of the lack of resources allocated to caregivers and the increasingly difficult context of exercise.”