LOST AND FOUND Items stashed in pockets eventually find their way back to the supply room.

Equipment and supplies in the operating room come up missing all the time. It's beyond me how that happens. Oh, I know small things like suture, dressings and instruments are easy to store in your pockets until you get a moment to return them to their proper place. That might not happen until the next day if, like me, you're halfway undressed in the changing room when you notice the items are still crammed in your pockets. So into the locker the items go until you can return them the next day.

Sometimes, instruments, cords, tips, hardware and expensive supplies somehow end up in the trash or the laundry bags. Some facilities wand the bags to check for concealed metal objects before pitching them down the chute. Should you find one, there's no dignified way to dumpster dive to fish out the missing items.

Criminal minds
Please tell me how equipment bigger than a breadbox and not on a sterile field can come up MIA? The circulator can't be stashing or tossing items that big in the locker or the trash. So, where are these items going?

I heard from one of my sources that a $10,000 neoprobe gamma detection system at her hospital had come up missing. Gamma probes are used primarily for sentinel lymph node mapping and parathyroid surgery. The hospital bought a second probe. It came up missing, too. How was this happening? Rumor has it they kept the third probe in a double-lock briefcase and handed it off to each shift supervisor.

I don't have a criminal mind. I don't know how to launder money or run numbers or steal someone's identity online. I still haven't mastered basics like attaching a Word file to an email. But I want to know how you can steal 2 probes worth $10,000 each without someone noticing? What would the thief do with a probe? It's not like you could pawn it like a piece of jewelry.

Surgical gray market?
I started asking questions. It was explained to me that the gray market might operate like this. The thief sells the probe to an underground middleman for $5,000. A facility that needs to buy a probe calls a man about a probe. The man with the probe turns around and sells the probe he bought for $5,000 for $8,000 — turning a tidy $3,000 profit and saving the facility $2,000 in a used equipment purchase.

In a prior life when I was the director of surgery at a hospital, pickups, needle holders and hemostats were always missing. Our counts were always correct, so I thought they were being thrown away. One Saturday I went to a flea market and there in a tent sat a scrub tech that worked in my department. He was selling surgical instruments. Long story short, he ceased working for the hospital very soon after that.

Is the story of the missing probe true or just an urban legend? I don't know. Is there a theft ring going on? I don't know. If you have a theory on the missing "stuff," let me know. In the meantime, keep your belongings safe and your probes closer to you (eerie organ music, please). OSM