New mum in 'excruciating pain' after epidural is left inside her back for days

A new mother has been left in ‘agonising pain’ after she says a medical mishap left her with an epidural stuck in her back for almost four days.

Selena Gray, 18, gave birth to a baby girl named Serenity in Florida on June 26, after receiving an epidural the day before.

The spinal anaesthesia, delivered through a catheter, is sometimes used for pain relief during childbirth. But Selena says her procedure went awry, leaving the epidural’s plastic entry tube lodged in her back.

“Basically, my epidural looped itself into my spine,” she told told Fox19.

“It’s in a knot in my spine, and they’ve been trying to tug at it and tug at it. I haven’t been able to get up or move or do anything.”

According to her Facebook post, the original hospital transferred the new mum to another medical centre two days later but she wrote their medical staff, ‘refuse to touch’ her.

Selena went on to tell followers in a Facebook live one doctor told her he had never ‘seen anything like this’.

She added that the doctors would ‘pull and pull at my spine,’ before eventually ‘cutting’ the catheter from her body.

“They used me as a practice tool,” she claimed in the video.

The hospital where Selena stayed did not immediately respond to Yahoo Lifestyle’s requests for comment, but declined to comment for Fox 19.

Selena eventually took matters into her own hands and transferred herself to another hospital five hours away, in northern Florida.

Here, doctors removed the epidural with an incision she said that she was on the mend.

“They had to make an incision leaving me with stitches but I'm on the road to recovery,” she wrote online.

However, just one day later Selena’s mother Patricia Alvarado revealed her symptoms had returned and she could not stand up and hold her baby at the same time.

“[Selena] is not doing to good and she is very scared and upset she can’t barely walk and she is in agonising pain,” Patricia wrote.

Additional reporting by Mahira Dayal.

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