Talk about a nightmarish scenario. You go in for a medical procedure and come home with a knife left in your body. Oh and by the way, no one at the hospital told you about it so you have no clue anything is wrong until the pain continues years later. It sounds like a plot line for some horror flick, except that it happens more often than you would think. Yesterday, MSNBC reported on the shocking number of cases where debris from medical devices is left inside of patients. Even more shocking is that some patients are never even notified when it happens. From the story:
A dozen years after Pamela Jones had surgery on her right knee, the White Plains, Md., woman learned why the pain continued long after the wound had healed: A doctor left a 2-inch scalpel blade inside her leg.
LaCheryl Robinson of Pontiac, Mich., endured nearly eight years of unexplained pain following a breast biopsy until a lump appeared last January and a new mammogram showed the source of the trouble: a broken needle embedded in her left breast.
And Lisa Schweska, a teacher from Springfield, Ill., missed most of last year with her third-grade class while doctors grappled with a metal blood-clot filter that shifted, pierced a vein and couldn’t be removed.(Click here for the full story)
Starting in October, Medicaid will no longer pay costs associated with leaving a "foreign object" in a patient after surgery and other obvious medical errors, and some states, like New York, are starting to do the same thing. It's certainly a step in the right direction but let's hope hospital personnel start speaking up when they see this kind of thing happen.
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