Unbelievable Story Of Woman Who Had A Surgical Clamp Lodged Inside Her Abdomen For 23 Years

A 62-year-old Russian woman recently learned that the acute pain she had lived with for over two decades was being caused by a surgical clamp forgotten inside her body after a cesarean.

Ezeta Gobeeva, a pensioner from Russia’s North Ossetia region, had been complaining of an acute abdominal pain ever since she underwent a C-section operation in 1996, but doctors always blamed it on liver problems and did nothing but prescribe painkillers. The woman claims that she was only recently granted an X-Ray, after repeatedly complaining that the medication only helped numb the pain.

The investigation revealed that the pain was caused by a surgical clamp lodged in her abdomen, which Gobeeva assumed must have been forgotten in her body by doctors who performed a cesarean operation 23 years ago.

Ezeta Gobeeva told Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda that when the stunned radiologist first saw the clamp on the X-Ray, he assumed that the woman had accidentally brought the metal object into the X-Ray room.

“She said ‘It shows scissors, you have scissors inside you’,” Ezeta recalled. ‘”What scissors?’, I asked, and she showed me the X-ray image. I was shocked, I remember nothing after that. I was crying, I was in hysterics. For so many years I was tortured.”

The surgical clamp, which resembles a pair of scissors, but is actually used by doctors to hold tissues and surgical swabs, is still in Ezeta’s body, but she has already been scheduled for an operation to have it removed.

The shocking case of medical malpractice has caused outrage in Russia, and prompted the North Ossetia health ministry to launch an investigation. 

A spokeswoman for the ministry has assured the public that the minister himself is supervising the investigation, and added that authorities will pay for the operation to remove the clamp and offer Gobeeva financial compensation for her years on unnecessary suffering.

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