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Surgery can be a daunting experience. Depending on the procedure, numerous precautions must be taken to ensure a smooth recovery. Trusting the medical team—nurses, doctors, and surgeons—is a crucial part of the process. It’s a leap of faith, knowing that these professionals will do their best to help you heal.
TV shows like Grey’s Anatomy and ER have prepared us for dramatic scenes: blood splattering, body parts being severed, organs being delayed. However, the reality is often far less intense—well, almost. With around 28 million surgeries conducted annually, errors do occur. Some of these mistakes involve shocking items left behind, such as towels, needles, and even entire surgical tools. Patients often discover that they’ve been sent home with unexpected souvenirs from their surgeries, which they certainly didn’t ask for.
While surgeries may not be as theatrical as portrayed on television, learning that something foreign remains inside your body after the procedure is certainly not news you want to hear after you’ve already been stitched up.
10. The Gloves Are Off
A French woman hoped that undergoing surgery to stop her excessive menstruation would bring an end to her problems. In April 2017, she underwent a new procedure designed to stop her periods without resorting to a full hysterectomy. The promise was clear: once the surgery was over, she would no longer suffer from bleeding or pain.
Despite being told that her surgery was a success and there were no complications, the woman didn’t experience the relief she was expecting. Instead, after the surgery, she began to feel pain in her lower abdomen—the very reason she had sought out the procedure in the first place. This persistent pain disrupted her sleep and made her feel constantly unwell. After struggling for a while, she reached out to her doctor, who dismissed it as being related to her weight and prescribed painkillers.
The painkillers failed to relieve her pain, and after three days, she started experiencing sharp, stabbing pains due to contractions. These contractions caused her to expel a glove and five compresses that had been unintentionally left inside her during the surgery, along with a large amount of blood that ultimately led to her being rushed to the hospital.
A similar incident occurred to a woman in England in 2013, following a routine hysterectomy that left her in excruciating pain. Three days after her surgery, Sharon Birks was still in agony, and her doctors prescribed antibiotics, suspecting the pain was due to an infection caused by the procedure.
However, the pain persisted. Mrs. Birks initially suspected it was related to her catheter, but a trip to the bathroom revealed the shocking truth. As she sat down, she felt pressure, followed by the unexpected expulsion of a surgical glove. While no harm was done, the experience itself was deeply unsettling.
Now, that’s what you’d call an unexpected birth.
9. Needle In A Haystack
The saying “finding a needle in a haystack” refers to searching for something almost impossible to find. Unfortunately, this adage was all too real for a man from Tennessee, who passed away after surgeons accidentally left a needle inside him following a surgery in May 2017.
John Burns Johnson had just finished a lengthy nine-hour heart surgery when his surgeon discovered that a needle was missing. An X-ray confirmed that the needle was still inside Mr. Johnson. A second operation was performed, but it remains unclear whether the needle could not be found or removed, yet it stayed inside his body.
Tragically, Mr. Johnson died a month later from complications caused by the presence of the needle. The needle was eventually found and removed during his autopsy.
As unbelievable as it sounds, this isn't the first time something like this has occurred. A woman discovered that an epidural needle had been left in her back, a shocking 14 years after her caesarean section in 2003. Living with back pain for years, she never realized the severity of the issue until an X-ray revealed that the needle had broken into three pieces along her spine. This oversight caused nerve damage and severe scarring along her spine.
If you're starting to reconsider having surgery, don’t worry; only about ten percent of items left behind in patients are needles.
8. Throw In The Towel
A man from California went into his doctor’s office fearing the worst after months of pain following an abdominal surgery for bladder cancer in April 2014. He experienced ongoing pain in his bowels, along with fatigue and an inability to drive himself to appointments. Expecting the cancer to have spread, he was shocked to learn that the mass causing all his pain was not cancer, but a towel.
Although all surgical instruments were accounted for, the surgical team had overlooked the towels used during the procedure. One of these towels ended up in the man's abdomen, causing a range of health issues, along with the frightening thought that his cancer had returned.
It's not uncommon for towels to be left behind in patients during surgery; in fact, they account for 2.1 percent of forgotten items and are invisible to X-rays. In 1995, a woman in Ohio went in for lung surgery, but something felt off afterward. She had a sensation that something was lodged in her chest, a feeling that stayed with her until her death seven years later. Only during the autopsy did they discover the source of her pain: a green towel, crumpled up and left in her lung.
Sadly, it was too late to fix the issue, but it did finally explain the woman's persistent sensation of something moving inside her chest, despite X-rays showing nothing. As for the California man, he made a full recovery, and the doctor responsible for the surgery was dismissed. The man then sued the hospital to cover the damages.
7. No Sponge About It
Bleeding is a common issue in surgery, and sponges are typically used to prevent the blood from spreading. However, leaving a sponge inside the patient is certainly not part of standard practice.
A woman in Japan had been dealing with unexplained abdominal bloating for three years, off and on, without any answers. When she finally visited the doctor to figure out the cause, tests revealed something shocking: not one, but two sponges were discovered inside her abdomen. These sponges were believed to have been left behind during her caesarean section six years earlier, and had attached themselves to the folds connecting her stomach, abdomen, and colon.
Though surgery provided her with the relief she desperately needed, leaving sponges behind in patients is more common than one might think. Around 70 percent of items discovered inside patients are sponges, and they can cause significant harm. Nearly two-thirds of the instances in which surgical items like sponges are left behind result in infections, injuries, or even fatalities.
In 2007, another woman found herself in a similar predicament after a dual bladder and hysterectomy procedure left a sponge inside her body. Initially, doctors diagnosed her with a gastrointestinal issue and sent her home. However, as her symptoms worsened and bleeding began, her gynecologist initially thought it was an ovarian cyst. After her ovaries were removed, the pain persisted. Further testing revealed that a mass had formed in her intestines, which had previously been blocked by her ovaries. The source of the mass became clear when it was discovered to be the sponge, which had embedded itself in her body. Following another surgery, which involved the removal of a large portion of her intestines, the sponge was finally extracted.
6. Wire Not?
Wires are commonly used in surgeries, and depending on the procedure, some need to remain inside the body. However, in one case in England, a wire was accidentally left behind following a routine surgery in August 2018. The missing wire wasn’t discovered until 12 hours later. Fortunately, this was early enough that the patient experienced no immediate harm, and a follow-up surgery was scheduled to remove it.
A similar, alarming incident took place with Donald Gable in Philadelphia. After undergoing heart surgery, Gable felt perfectly fine and went home. However, during a follow-up appointment, he was shocked to learn that a 0.6-meter (2 ft) wire had been left inside his chest for six weeks. Thankfully, the wire was successfully removed, though Gable was fortunate that it didn’t puncture a vein due to its precarious position.
Wires are frequently used by doctors to assist in guiding instruments to the appropriate locations. At Albany Medical Center, two wires were unintentionally left inside patients during surgeries. One of these wires had been employed for guiding during a catheter procedure. It wasn't until the patient had an X-ray that doctors could locate and remove the wire.
The second incident happened during a caesarean section, when the wire from a probe was accidentally severed. The staff was aware that a piece of the wire was missing, but they did not believe it remained inside the woman, so they proceeded to close her stitches. Once again, it wasn't until she later had X-rays that the wire was discovered.
Although no significant damage resulted from these mishaps, the surgical team was clearly being too careless when dealing with the wire.
5. Rock, Paper...Scissors?
When we're young, parents often have to remind us to handle scissors carefully. However, for a woman in Australia, that warning should have been extended to her surgeon as well.
In 2001, 69-year-old Pat Skinner underwent surgery to remove part of her colon. Initially, she was told that pain was normal given the nature of the procedure. But the pain persisted, and Mrs. Skinner felt it was far worse than what doctors had described. Her instincts were right—something more serious was at play.
An X-ray by her general practitioner revealed the shocking truth: 18-centimeter scissors had been left inside her body during the surgery. These scissors had become lodged against her tailbone, causing intense pain. By the time they were discovered, tissue had started to grow over them, necessitating further surgery, which also involved removing part of her bowel.
This isn’t an isolated incident. In 2016, a man who had undergone surgery 18 years earlier for an accident began suffering from persistent abdominal pain. An X-ray uncovered the same horrifying issue: scissors had been left inside his body. These rusted scissors were embedded in his organs, and a three-hour-long surgery was required to remove them. Despite the lengthy time the scissors had been inside him, he made a full recovery.
It’s as if the doctors weren’t just careless with scissors—they were playing with their patients' lives.
4. To Cut or Not to Cut? That is the Question.
A surgeon's skill is often measured by the steadiness of their hands and the quality of their instruments. That’s why it’s so shocking when a surgeon ends up losing their tools... inside their patient.
This shocking reality hit Army veteran Glenford Turner, who underwent prostate surgery in 2013 following a cancer diagnosis. Although the operation lasted longer than anticipated, he was not informed of any issues, and was reassured that recovery would be straightforward. But the pain never subsided. After four years of persistent discomfort, Mr. Turner sought medical help once again.
What the doctors discovered was not a tumor but a foreign object. It turned out that a scalpel from his previous surgery had been left inside him, moving between his bladder and rectal area, and causing much of the ongoing pain.
Fortunately, the scalpel was successfully removed. This was not the case for Victor Hutchinson, who was admitted to the hospital believing he had gallbladder problems. However, an X-ray revealed his gallbladder wasn’t the issue. It turns out that months earlier, Mr. Hutchinson had undergone heart bypass surgery, during which a scalpel had gone missing. Though the hospital staff knew about the missing instrument, they couldn’t locate it, even after performing an X-ray on Mr. Hutchinson’s chest, which showed nothing.
What the surgical team didn’t realize was that the scalpel had moved from the chest cavity and become lodged in Mr. Hutchinson’s abdominal area near his spine. When it was finally discovered in a later X-ray, the doctors determined that it was too dangerously positioned to be safely removed. Of all the souvenirs he could have had from his surgery, it’s doubtful that Mr. Hutchinson wanted to keep this one.
3. Everything But the Kitchen Sink
While many of these cases are disturbing, nothing is quite as unsettling as a man undergoing cancer surgery only to leave with 16 additional problems. The cause of these problems? Surgical tools left behind during the procedure.
Dirk Schroeder’s 2009 surgery was expected to be a routine procedure, with only minor side effects. However, what he experienced afterward was the complete opposite. Post-surgery, Mr. Schroeder suffered from pain, fatigue, discomfort, and illness. His doctors initially thought this was just part of the recovery process, until his home health care nurse noticed something odd: a gauze pad was visible coming out of his stitches. Scans revealed that 16 items had been left inside his body, including swabs, a 15-centimeter bandage roll, a compress, needles, and even part of a surgical mask—all of which had been impairing his recovery.
Each year, around 1,500 patients suffer from having items unintentionally left inside their bodies during surgery. These foreign objects can range from gauze to surgical tools, but it's rare for multiple different items to be left behind. Unfortunately for Mr. Schroeder, it took him two additional surgeries to remove the 16 objects, whether intact or fragmented, that were left inside him.
The question that both Mr. Schroeder's family and the public want answered is how the surgical team failed to notice that a large number of their instruments were missing after the procedure.
2. Pull This Back!
While retained foreign objects are a rare occurrence, they do happen from time to time. While sponges, gauze, and needles are the most commonly left behind, it’s not unheard of for entire tools like scissors, wires, or even retractors to be left inside a patient.
A man from Seattle can attest to this after he experienced persistent pain following his surgery in 2000. His doctor assured him that the discomfort was normal and could last up to a month. However, after triggering metal detectors at an airport, Mr. Donald Church sought a second opinion. A CAT scan revealed that a 33-centimeter-long (13 in) retractor had been left inside him during his procedure to remove a cancerous tumor a month earlier. The retractor had been pressing on his abdomen and chest, making him feel as though he was slowly dying.
This incident took place at the University of Washington Medical Center, which later admitted in a lawsuit that this wasn’t the first time such an event had occurred. In fact, almost a year earlier, a woman had a retractor left inside her after her surgery to remove cancer. The retractor went unnoticed for nearly a month before doctors discovered the source of her pain.
While these cases were quickly addressed, one unnamed patient wasn’t as fortunate. His discomfort lasted intermittently for 27 years following his 1979 surgery to remove abdominal polyps. After the procedure, the patient felt pain in his side, but doctors attributed it to an abdominal hematoma. However, over two decades later, an X-ray revealed a large metal mass near his pelvis. The culprit was a 28-centimeter (11 in) surgical retractor that had been missed in the initial post-surgery X-rays, 27 years earlier.
Despite its name, it seems doctors often forget to retract the very objects they use during surgery.
1. You’ve Got This, Clamp
Clamps play a crucial role during surgery, as they help keep everything steady when other things are shifting. They’re so essential that sometimes they’re overlooked—until the patient is jolted back to reality by an unpleasant reminder.
Even seemingly routine procedures can take unexpected turns. In 2011, a patient who went in for a simple gastric band removal ended up needing much more surgery. Though the procedure appeared successful, the surgical team failed to notice that a 20-centimeter (8 in) clamp had been left inside. Three days later, the clamp was discovered, and another operation was planned to remove it. However, during this second surgery, the patient began to bleed heavily and, tragically, had to have their spleen removed.
