Mental Health

Pregnant Woman Finds Surgical Pin Poking Out of Her Baby Bump

By Drishya Nair | Update Date: Jul 21, 2012 02:28 PM EDT

In a bizarre incident, a 26-year-old pregnant woman was horrified to find a surgical pin popping out of her baby bump at the eighth month of her pregnancy.

Kelly Donegan, a resident of Milton Keynes, Bucks, had been experiencing a needle poking sensation on the left side of her stomach from quite some time, but she never thought that it was something she needed to be worried about.

However, she was alarmed when she found a pin poking out of her stomach one day located hardly some inches away from the fetus she is carrying.  

Donegan says that perhaps the pin has been left inside from last three years, ever since she had her appendix operation.

When Donegan noticed and mentioned about a tiny bump on top of her pregnant belly, to her doctor, he assured her that there was "nothing to worry about."

"It must have been inside me since 2009, when I had my appendix removed. My stomach is getting bigger and bigger and all the pressure must have forced it out," Donegan was quoted as saying by Mail Online.

Now even though the pin hurts Donegan, there is not much that the doctors can do about it. They have no option but to wait until she delivers her baby, so that they can remove the pin.

"They can't even do an X-ray to see how much of the thing is inside me because X-rays are dangerous for pregnant women," Donegan, already a mother of three, said.

Donegan has been assured that the pin does not pose a threat to the baby and told that she will have to undergo a surgery after her delivery to remove the pin after she has given birth.

"All they can do until then is trim the sharp end off it so it doesn't catch on things. It's horrible and it's also quite sore. But there's nothing I can do except wait," she said according to the report.

Surgical tools left in the body can puncture vital organs and blood vessels. There have been number of similar cases reported before including cases where needles, knife blades, safety pins, scalpels, clamps, scissors, sponges, towels, and electrosurgical adapters have been left inside a patient's body.

The reason behind such kind of errors could be many, including human errors such as exhaustion, lack of tools necessary to aid in producing an accurate count, and a chaotic environment.

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