Medical instrument left inside Quebec woman after cancer surgery

“When the surgery starts, everything that’s used is counted — everything — and at the end, there’s another count to make sure nothing is left inside a patient,” he said.

But in the operation involving Sylvie Dube, the team that did the checking “clearly made a mistake,” he said.

Dube told Radio-Canada she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer last October and underwent chemotherapy over the winter before the March 14 hysterectomy.

Dube complained of pain the day after the operation — not in the abdomen but in a shoulder.

“It was like being stabbed with a knife,” she said.

Her doctor and nurses at Notre-Dame Hospital told her it was normal a hysterectomy would cause pain elsewhere in her body.

She began taking anti-inflammatory medication but the pain increased.

Discouraged, she went to the hospital’s emergency room on May 22 and had a scan that revealed a metal object in her body.

“They told me, ‘We see a 30-centimetre metal plate in your stomach’,” Dube said. “I said, ‘I don’t have a metal plate in my abdomen.”

The medical report indicated a “flexible blade”, 33 centimetres long, had been left inside her abdomen during her surgery in March.

The instrument was removed May 25.

“It’s an unfortunate event and no one is happy with that, but it’s impossible to have zero complications,” Barrette said.

The Canadian Press

by Canadian Press

Medical instrument left inside Quebec woman after cancer surgery

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