At a press conference Thursday, U.S. Surgeon General Sylvia Trent-Adams confirmed that she had lost her “best” surgical sponge and requested any American finding it return the sponge immediately to the Department Of Health lost-and-found box.
“It’s light blue and mostly squarish, and one of the corners is sort of worn down,” Trent-Adams said of the lost sponge, further noting that the sponge was “really good at soaking up blood,” that it fit her hand perfectly, and whoever returned it would receive twenty dollars.
Trent-Adams expressed confidence that the errant sponge had been misplaced within a chest cavity. “I definitely last remember it next to a lung or heart or something, so every American should definitely get a chest x-ray or at least do a self-exam in the sternum area,” she recommended. “You’re looking for a squishy lump.”
“The sponge might be really wedged in there and hard to see, especially if it’s covered in lymph,” Trent-Adams noted. While she said she did not believe the sponge was within an abdomen, she advised checking abdominal areas “just in case” such a search might uncover other missing pieces of surgical equipment. “So, it couldn’t hurt,” she said.
The Surgeon General stressed the importance of finding and returning the sponge quickly. “Over 10,000 general surgeries are performed on Americans each day, but until I have my lucky sponge I’m not comfortable doing any of them,” Trent-Adams said. She confirmed that the surgical moratorium would be indefinite and in the meantime all emergency surgeries-general should be directed to Canadian Surgeon General H.C. MacKay.
Trent-Adams stated her hope that the sponge would not end up like her favorite scalpel, which she believed had been accidentally lobbed into a corpse in 2015.
