Each piece of gauze is implanted with a miniature radio frequency tag the size of a rice grain
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One night in 2005, Sofia Savach, a nurse in Kentucky, USA, was on duty and suddenly suffered severe abdominal pain. The examination results showed that a piece of gauze was forgotten in her belly by the doctor during a hysterectomy four years ago.
In areas where blood vessels were clustered, nerves were densely packed, and organs were stacked, gauze stuck to her bladder, hooked her stomach, and stuck tightly to the wall of the abdominal cavity. The infection caused Savaqi’s intestines to be removed.
Savage sued the hospital, and after another four years, she received $2.5 million in damages.
A lot of dollars are irretrievable: intestinal problems, severe anxiety and depression that accompanied this woman throughout her life. She is 59 years old, unable to work, and hardly going out of the house anymore.
Leaving surgical supplies in the human body is not a case, but something that may happen where there is an operating table on the earth. There are no statistics in China. According to reports, there are an estimated 4,000 occurrences in the United States every year. The forgotten things in the human body include sponges, cotton balls, screws, gauze pieces… and even large surgical instruments.
A woman from Zhejiang Province, China, whose baby was 18 years old, discovered that the surgical forceps were still in her belly. An old man in Hannover, Germany, after cutting the tumor, there were 16 remnants in his body, including a needle, a 15-centimeter-long bandage roll, several cotton swabs, and even fragments of a medical mask.
Two thirds of all foreign objects that “invade” the human body while taking advantage of the chaos in the operating room are gauze used to suck blood and stop bleeding. The longer the operation time, the more gauze is used.
Although modern medicine has been highly developed, and the operating room equipment has been highly sophisticated, “Don’t forget the gauze in the human body”, the most primitive method is used-counting. Count it before use, and count it after use.
Imagine that scene, the vital signs monitor is ticking, the scalpel forceps are tangled, the sweat from the doctor’s forehead slips into the corner of the eye sore and itchy, and the nurse is nervously on standby. In the pale light of the shadowless lamp, a piece of gauze a few centimeters square soaked up blood, slowly sinking into the complex and soft abdominal cavity. The operation was successful, people embraced with joy, the operation failed, and people mourned and cried. Noisy environment, exhausted doctors… The nurse turned over the tray with his bloodied gloves, “Did you use 12 gauze or 13?”
In order to clarify this problem thoroughly, in recent years, the American Association of Operating Room Nurses and the American College of Surgeons have called on hospitals to keep pace with the times and not just arithmetic.
Finding and searching for gauze, a thoracic surgeon at the Will Cornell Medical Center in New York developed a radio frequency detection system. Each piece of gauze is implanted with a miniature radio frequency tag the size of a rice grain. After the operation, if any gauze is left in the patient’s body, the detector will sound an alarm. The whole journey takes only 12 seconds and costs $10.
Don’t be ignorant, you will be surprised when you use it. According to a tracking by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in 11 months, the system intercepted 23 pieces of gauze that were almost left behind from nearly 3,000 operations. If a piece is worth 2.5 million US dollars, it is more than half a billion.
There is also a more simple technique, even the big sister at the supermarket checkout can use it, scan the bar code-one piece of gauze, one code, scan it before and after the operation!
Many people in the industry who are concerned about the safety of surgery regard these technologies as a “safety net”, hoping that they can stop the gauze hiding between the fingers of nurses. But only 1% of hospitals in the United States use these technologies.
American doctor Berto Lopez once made a mistake on the issue of gauze. Today, he refuses to operate in a hospital without that electronic “safety net”. In his opinion, most hospitals do not even want to spend more than $10.
These “gauze chasers” even set up an item for “Don’t leave anything behind.” A doctor who participated in the project said that some hospitals are still using “counting bags”-very cheap. Each piece of gauze is placed in a grid. After the operation, you can confirm that the grid is refilled with used gauze.
This piece of gauze that concerns the lives of patients is also related to the future of doctors. If every piece of gauze has a record of where it goes, then there will be a lot of 2.5 million US dollars that will be spent on more worthwhile places. Conversely, in Weifang, Shandong, people who want to blackmail can’t frame hospitals and doctors. The doctor is neither chilling nor timid. Next time, the patient with the same condition may still keep the uterus.
However, after all, technology is only a “safety net”, an auxiliary means. Electronic products are cold, silent and not good at playing hooligans. For both doctors and patients, the real safety is still in the hands of warm people.
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