Doctors remove forceps from man’s stomach after 18 years!

When reality is as bizarre as fiction.

Do you dread going under the knife because of a fear that the doctors would leave something in your body unknowingly? After all, we’ve all made jokes about this, and there was a time when stories of gauze and scissors being left inside patients undergoing surgery – mostly inside the stomach – but for this Vietnamese man, it was real life.

According to Vietnam national TV channel VTV, a man was finally freed from an unwanted, alien object inside his body – no less than 18 years after it was forgetfully left it. Doctors in Vietnam have removed surgical forceps from a man who unknowingly carried them inside his body for 18 years.

Ma Van Nhat, 54, said the forceps had probably been left in his abdomen in 1998 when he had emergency surgery after a traffic accident. Nhat had felt only the occasional pain and a clinic had given him medicine for a suspected stomach ulcer. An X-ray taken late last year showed the forceps were to blame.

The 15cm-long instrument had broken apart and become lodged in Nhat’s stomach. They were removed in an operation.

Currently, there is an ongoing investigation to find out who may have left the forceps in Nhat, the director of Bac Kan Hospital, Trinh Thi Luong, told VTV. “Even if they are already retired we will still inform them,” she said. “This is a lesson to all doctors”.

Medical errors are not uncommon in Vietnam. Over the past year there have been two cases of doctors operating on wrong limbs, and three cases of men being diagnosed as pregnant.