Doctor Left Scissors in Woman’s Abdomen for 7 Months — Then Dismissed Her Pain as ‘Post-Operative’

A 53-year-old woman was left horrified after doctors discovered that her persistent stomach pain was caused by a pair of surgical scissors allegedly left inside her body after an operation. A woman in Naples, Italy, underwent abdominoplasty in October 2025.

Abdominoplasty, commonly referred to as a tummy tuck, is a procedure in which excess fat and skin are removed from the abdomen to make it look flatter.

A person usually undergoes the procedure right after pregnancy or excessive weight loss. The procedure doesn’t take more than five hours and is considered safe if performed by a board-certified plastic surgeon. That said, in the case of the 53-year-old woman, things went wrong very quickly.

After the surgery, the woman returned to her parents’ house and began feeling pain in her abdomen. At one point, the woman even lost consciousness. The woman, worried, called 118, the Italian medical emergency number. Upon hearing the woman’s symptoms, the doctors advised her to immediately get hospitalized.

The concerned woman later contacted the surgeon who performed the procedure, but he reportedly downplayed the issue, suggesting her symptoms were likely just “post-operative.” The woman was prescribed to undergo some tests, which revealed that she had an infection. However, the antibiotics did not help with the infection, as the woman’s condition continued to deteriorate.

Seven months following the incident, the 53-year-old decided to get a test done at a separate diagnostic center. The test was performed on May 7, 2026, wherein doctors finally discovered a pair of scissors sitting in the woman’s abdomen for a baffling seven months. Instead of telling the woman to undergo an emergency surgery, the doctor informed the original surgeon of the mishap.

After realizing the error, the plastic surgeon urged the woman to return to the clinic in order to remove the scissors. However, the gravely concerned woman refused and filed a police complaint instead. “The surgeon’s wife also called to apologize and advised me to be readmitted to the same private clinic,” the unnamed woman recalled. “But I refused. I will never set foot inside there again.”

The authorities are yet to make any statement on the matter. However, police are investigating the case, with the woman set to undergo surgery to get rid of the scissors soon. Surgeon errors are quite common in the medical field. In fact, the National Institutes of Health estimates that 4,000 surgical errors occur in the U.S. alone each year.

Across the world, over 300 million surgeries are performed each year. That said, surgical errors such as leaving foreign objects inside a patient are quite common, with up to 1,500 occurrences in the U.S. every year. According to reports, 30 to 80 deaths occur every year owing to such errors. However, the actual number is skewed because many incidents go unreported.