This just in from the medical front: A recent study revealed that surgeons leave tools in 1,500 people a year.
I find this news disturbing because (a) I'm disturbed; (b) carrying a scalpel in my chest cavity could get me arrested at the airport X-ray machine; (c) if I want a souvenir from my hospital visit, I'll settle for the plastic wristband and the complimentary bottle of mouthwash.
No thanks on the scissors and clamps in my colon. We're not even supposed to put whole milk in our bodies; a metal retractor can't be good.
According to the study, approximately 1,500 people go home with more than stitches after an operation. They have retractors, sponges, clamps, electrodes and anything else that isn't nailed down in the OR sewn inside them, which means somebody's got to go back in there and retrieve them. This must be an awkward moment in the old doctor-patient relationship. ("The good news is I removed your tumor; the bad news is, um, I need my laser scalpel back.")
Surgeons, the report says, leave tools lying around in the abdomen, brain, hips, chest and a certain area of the female anatomy that gets a lot of attention from gynecologists (I don't know about you, but that's just way too much information). I talked to two Salt Lake operating-room nurses and a surgeon, but none of them has seen a patient go home with extra baggage.
"It's never happened here that I know of," says one of the nurses at Cottonwood Hospital. "We count everything. We count the sponges and needles before we start a case, and then we count twice before we close up. So it would have to be three mistakes (to leave something in a patient)."
Fine, but most, if not all, hospitals use the same procedure, and that doesn't help those 1,500 patients (and this is when you remember reading about how American math skills are declining faster than Nasdaq). If I ever have an operation, I'm taking a CPA in there with me and two assistants to help with the counting. Nobody closes me until they all get the same score.
"I have never personally had that happen, but I know of incidents in which it has," says one Salt Lake surgeon. According to him, the problem of doctors sewing tools or sponges into patients rises significantly when they're fat — the patients, I mean, not the doctors. When you think about it, that doesn't eliminate much of the population.
"If you're working on the abdominal area, for example, you have to use sponges sort of like sandbags to give yourself an area to work in," he explains. "It would be pretty difficult to lose anything with a lean person."
Doctors have taken numerous precautions to prevent this embarrassing problem. For instance, they put a metal thread in the sponges so that if any of them are missing after an operation they'll show up on an X-ray. And still, it happens.
Doctors say that considering there are 28 million operations performed annually, they've got a pretty good batting average. It's highly unlikely you'll go home with a towel and a doctor's class ring in your gut. And yet I know one former football player who had knee surgery, and a decade later surgeons opened the knee up again and found old gauze bandages and sponges in there.
I'm going to take my own precautions. From now on, I'll be giving my surgeons a little pop quiz before we go in the operating room and begin cutting. The quiz goes something like this:
1. Do you have any nicknames such as "Doctor Mulligan" or "Tom Thumbs"?
2. In the past 30 years, has anyone ever described you as absentminded, forgetful and — ha, ha — someone who would lose his head if it wasn't attached?
3. After an operation, have you ever said these four words: "Anybody seen my Rolex?"
4. Do you forget where you left your keys, shoes, wallet, car?
5. Do your nurses consider counting from 1 to 30 "new math"?
6. Has the hospital ever billed you for missing scissors, scalpels, gloves and clamps?
7. Do any of your patients rattle like a drawer of silverware when you wheel them to the recovery room?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, please count me out as a patient.
Doug Robinson's column runs on Tuesdays. E-mail drob@desnews.com.