A surgical sponge left within a patient after an operation.

The word first appeared in a 1978 article titled "Gossypiboma: The problem of the retained surgical sponge" in Radiology, a popular medical journal. Gossypiboma is Latin gossypium for cotton and Swahili boma for concealed place glued together to form a weird word both in meaning and sound.

Surgeons justify it as a memento that they sometimes accidentally leave behind to commemorate their presence in some poor patient's abdomen. According to The New England Journal of Medicine, approximately 4,000 sponges are accidentally left inside patients every year. In at least 88 percent of these cases, the medical staff had falsely recorded a correct sponge count after surgery. The situation has become so dire that there are medical-equipment companies who have now invented sponges with RFID (radio frequency identification) tags in them to closely track their whereabouts.

Gossypiboma, also referred as texitiloma (textile + oma, tumor), can have immediate to long term effects on the human body. Abdominal swelling, pain without fever, nausea and vomitting, alien body infection, organ damage and up to 35 percent mortality rate. In some cases, the sponge gets embedded in the inner tissues and are often mistaken to be tumors. Patients have had parts of their intestines removed by such wrong diagnosis.

If a patient makes a complaint about a surgical error the hospital will form a committee with at least two expert specialist physicians to investigate the doctor(s) and the staff nurses who performed the surgery and to decide the appropriate steps to take depending on the magnitude of complications. Penalties range from a discount in salary to a delay in promotion or both.

Facts and Figures from: http://www.injurytriallawyer.com