Woman Sues Hospital After Surgical Sponge Is Left Inside Her

A woman is suing a California hospital after what she says has been a medical nightmare due to a surgical mistake, NewsMax Health reports.

CBS News reports that Carol Critchfield was 56 in 2007, when she went to Simi Valley Hospital for a standard hysterectomy and bladder-support surgery.

Three days after her surgery, her husband took her back to the hospitable because she was complaining of pain, but the staff her symptoms off as not serious.

"They took an X-ray, and then they told me it appeared that I was severely constipated, and they pretty much just sent me home," Critchfield said. A year later she was rushed by ambulance to the hospital after feeling ill, faint, and having blurred vision.

Again, the hospital staff suggested her symptoms were uncritical, suggesting she had eaten too much spicy food. But by 2011, her symptoms began to include bleeding. After suspecting an ovarian cyst, her gynecologist removed her ovaries — at which point her surgeon discovered a surgical sponge from her hysterectomy had been left inside her body.

"The surgeon came back and told my husband that it was not a mass inside my small intestine," Critchfield said. "It was a sponge that was left in, and it had become completely encased with scar tissue. So, they had to remove a large amount of my intestine."

She has filed a lawsuit against the hospital, the doctors, and the radiologist involved in her previous checkups. The State Department of Public Health fined the hospital in 2012 — $25,000 for Critchfield’s incident, and $50,000 months later, for another patient in whom an 8-inch surgical clamp had been forgotten.

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