The horror of discovering that an NHS doctor has left a surgical item inside your body MONTHS later

The birth of Elise Cattle's first child was traumatic. A so-called back-to-back birth – in which the baby's spine is against the mother's, making labour longer and more painful – meant the delivery saw her incur a fourth-degree tear, the most severe type that can occur in childbirth.

But, as the weeks went by, rather than the pain subsiding, she remained crippled with it.

'I couldn't walk until my son was five weeks old, and I physically couldn't sit down,' recalls Elise, 37, from Hull . 'I'd have to lie down.

'If my son needed his nappy changing, I had to have him laid across my stomach, then pass him to a family member to be put back down. Because it was my first child, I didn't know any different. I thought that's how painful it should be after having a child.'

When she raised her concerns with midwives and her GP, she was reassured that this was to be expected. 'They just kept telling me, "You've got an infection, it'll get better," Elise says. 'I was literally going to the doctor every week. Some weeks I'd be on three different lots of antibiotics.'

Four months later, however, Elise, now a full-time mother of four, was still in agonising pain. Bleeding regularly, she began to notice a putrid smell. 'No matter how much I washed, I couldn't get rid of this smell,' she says. 'My mum came with me to the doctor, and she said, 'She needs looking at now, because this isn't normal.'

Four months after her pregnancy, Elise Cattle was still in agonising pain

An examination soon revealed the cause – while stemming the bleeding post-birth, the medical team had left a cotton swab inside her. 'The GP pulled it out there and then,' Elise says.

And yet nothing improved. 'The doctor just left it at that, but I still continued to bleed. I kept going back, and getting put on more antibiotics for infections.'

Eventually, a full eight months after giving birth, her GP finally agreed to send her for a scan. It revealed that it hadn't just been the one rogue swab – in fact, multiple swabs remained inside her.

'I'd given birth in the August, and these swabs didn't get removed until the following April,' says Elise. 'It was ongoing for eight months. Constant pain and constant bleeding, and not being listened to.'

At the time, she was in her early 20s. Now, 13 years on, Elise remains deeply affected by the experience, both physically and mentally.

Indeed, the presence of the swabs left her with permanent physical damage. 'I still have a lot of pain from all the scarring,' she says. 'I never fully healed.'

Such cases of 'retained foreign objects' – the term given when pieces of medical equipment are mistakenly left inside patients during operations or procedures – are classified by the NHS as so-called 'Never Events', catastrophic and preventable medical errors which should not happen if safety guidelines are followed.

Yet they still do. NHS England figures released last week show that 403 Never Events took place between April 2025 and March 2026, including 121 cases of retained foreign objects. NHS doctors and nurses left items inside patients which ranged from swabs and cotton wool balls to guide wires, surgical instruments and even surgical gloves. Such events inevitably cost the NHS dearly in compensation settlements. Elise later received £7,500 from Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust.

'Elise's case highlights how completely avoidable errors in hospitals across the country can have a massively damaging impact on the lives of patients and their families,' says Matthew Gascoyne, a senior solicitor at Hudgell Solicitors who represented Elise.

'These should have been happy times for Elise to cherish. However, her memories of this time are of being in intense pain and unable to do anything for her son.'

So why do these mistakes happen? According to Dileep Lobo, professor of gastrointestinal surgery at the University of Nottingham, who has carried out research on cases of retained foreign objects and how to prevent them, the predominant reason is simply mistakes made when counting.

'At the end of the day, it all amounts to human error,' says Professor Lobo. 'With instruments, the nurses count the instruments at the start and at the end of the operation, to make sure they're all taken out. Every now and then we get a Never Event, and it's a matter of paying attention to detail.'

A more effective way of avoiding such Never Events would be a post-surgical scan. Professor Lobo says that the majority of items used in these procedures – are all electronically tagged, meaning that their presence in the body could be detected on an X-ray or CT scan. Yet for cost reasons, such scans are not routinely used.

'The Americans have got systems where they can scan the body and make sure there are no swabs left in, but we don't have that in the UK at the moment,' says Lobo. 'If the swab [or instrument] count is incorrect, the surgeon will have a look inside the body cavity. If we don't find the missing swab, then we will have an X-ray d…