NY Mum Discovers Surgical Needle in Abdomen Seven Years After Surgery

There is a particular horror in the idea of a foreign object resting inside the body—a horror that is not abstract but visceral, that transforms the intimate space of one's own flesh into something unknown and untrustworthy. For Jana Petriganova DeGregoris, a cardiothoracic nurse practitioner in New York, that horror became reality. For seven years, she suffered from unexplained abdominal pain, a suffering that doctors could not diagnose, that treatments could not resolve, that she simply endured. And then, in October 2025, a CT scan revealed the cause: a nearly four-centimeter surgical needle, left inside her abdomen during one of two procedures she had undergone years earlier.

The lawsuit, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, names Mount Sinai Hospital and three doctors—Isabel Blumberg, Philip Torina, and Scott Nguyen—as defendants . The first procedure was a caesarean section with plastic surgery wound closure performed on June 28, 2018. The second was an abdominoplasty with laparoscopic umbilical hernia repair on November 17, 2021. The lawsuit claims the needle was "negligently, carelessly and improperly" left behind during one of these operations . Which one remains unclear. What is clear is that the needle stayed in her body for years, causing "severe and serious personal injuries and severe physical pain" .

The irony of the case is difficult to overlook. Petriganova DeGregoris has worked as a cardiothoracic nurse practitioner at Mount Sinai since 2013—the same hospital network she and her husband, Gerard, are now suing . She is not a stranger to the medical system. She understands its protocols, its standards, its expectations. And yet, the system she served failed her in a way that is both rare and profoundly unsettling: a retained surgical item, a known risk in operating rooms that protocols are designed to prevent.

For seven years, she lived with the consequences. The pain was chronic, unexplained, and unrelenting. It affected her daily life, her work, her ability to care for her family. When the CT scan finally revealed the needle in October 2025, the explanation arrived alongside a new ordeal: a third surgery to remove the object that had been inside her for years . The needle was approximately 3.8 centimeters long—roughly an inch and a half—and it had been there through pregnancies, through surgeries, through the ordinary movements of a body going about its life .

Mount Sinai and the three named doctors did not respond to requests for comment. The couple's attorney, John Cagney, declined to comment . The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages. For Petriganova DeGregoris, the discovery of the needle resolved a mystery but did not undo the years of suffering. The case will now proceed through the courts, where the question of how a surgical needle came to be left inside a patient—and why it took seven years to find it—will be examined. For now, she and her husband are seeking accountability for a mistake that should not have happened, in a system designed to prevent it.

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Sources: New York Post, The Nightly, NT News, Seoul Shinmun, Izvestia, NEWS.ru