I had a needle and thread stuck inside of me for 11 years – I was in agony

She was in sew much pain.

A 39-year-old woman from a rural village in Colombia discovered that she had a needle and thread stuck inside of her for 11 years, causing her over 4,000 days of pure agony.

María Aderlinda Forero had her fallopian tubes tied right after she gave birth to her fourth child in 2012 – but while getting the surgery, doctors left some of their operating materials inside of her, according to Jam Press.

In an interview with the Colombian weekly magazine Semana that was translated into English, Forero explained that, at first, she had chalked up the pain to typical postpartum side effects.

“Several days later, these pains started,” Forero told La Patilla, a Venezuelan news outlet, in another interview. “They didn’t stop, so I started making appointments, and every time I went they sent me to take acetaminophen and that’s it.”

Her discomfort only got worse, and the suffering Forero experienced was debilitating and even upended her life.

She was forced to change jobs a number of times because she was so unwell, reported Jam Press.

In order to see doctors, she had to go into town on her husband’s motorcycle, which was costly to her and her family.

The hospital was also a long way from her house – nearly two hours, according to La Patilla.

Forero’s doctors eventually put her on stronger painkillers such as meloxicam, but nothing was working.

She described being in so much pain that she couldn’t move around and had a lot of trouble sleeping.

Since she lived in such a rural area, her ability to see the doctor was also affected by the weather, as the roads would get destroyed during the winter.

Nearly a decade later, in November 2022, she was finally ordered an MRI scan and an ultrasound, where they found the needle and thread stuck in her stomach.

“He told me that in surgery they left me a needle with thread,” she told Semana. “I couldn’t believe it and neither could she.”

When she brought the scan’s results back to the doctor who had originally operated on her, he suggested that it wasn’t his doing and that it may have actually been Forero who swallowed a needle and thread at some point, according to Semana.

But having a foreign object stuck inside of you for years is extremely dangerous and can even cause cancer, according to the outlet.

She is waiting to get an assessment for the surgery to remove the needle and thread.

“What I need is for them to operate quickly, for them to remove this because I don’t want to die and leave my children,” she said.

Unfortunately, Forero is not the only person who has been stuck with a strange object inside of them after getting surgery.

Last year, doctors had to remove a 20-year-old piece of gauze found in a 65-year-old patient’s body.

The gauze had been left in her after physicians operated on her in 1999 to treat her gastric cancer.

In 2019, it was discovered that a man from Saudi Arabia had a 3-inch pair of tweezers lodged in his urethra for four years.