A Scarsdale nurse is suing Mount Sinai and three doctors after a CT scan found a surgical needle left inside her abdomen for years, her lawsuit claims.
Jana Petriganova DeGregoris and her husband, Gerard DeGregoris, filed suit in Manhattan Supreme Court alleging that a roughly 1.5-inch needle was left in her belly during one of two operations at the Manhattan hospital.
The filing says doctors Mount Sinai staff “negligently, carelessly and improperly” left the foreign object behind, and that she only learned of it on a CT scan years later.
She then needed another surgery to take it out. The couple seeks unspecified damages for what the suit describes as severe injuries and severe physical pain.
Petriganova DeGregoris underwent a C-section with plastic surgery wound closure on June 28, 2018. Doctors Isabel Blumberg and Philip Torina handled that procedure, the suit says.
On Nov. 17, 2021, she had an abdominoplasty with laparoscopic umbilical hernia repair. That operation was performed by Scott Nguyen and Torina, according to the filing.
The lawsuit does not pin the retained object to one date over the other. It states only that the roughly 1.5-inch needle or surgical tool was left during one of those two surgeries.
She learned about the foreign object on Oct. 14, 2025, during a CT scan. Surgeons then removed it in a later operation.
"[She] sustain[ed] severe and serious personal injuries and severe physical pain when a foreign object was left in her abdomen,"
the suit states.
Petriganova DeGregoris is not a casual patient at the institution named in the complaint. She has worked at Mount Sinai as a cardiothoracic nurse practitioner since 2013, per her LinkedIn profile as cited in the reporting on the case.
That detail sharpens the accountability question. A longtime clinician at a major Manhattan hospital system says her own care left a sharp object inside her for years before imaging finally caught it.
The couple lives in Scarsdale. Their attorney, John Cagney, declined to comment. Mount Sinai and doctors Blumberg, Torina, and Nguyen did not return requests for comment.
The Sept. 24 Manhattan Supreme Court filing frames the core claim in plain terms: a foreign object left behind, years of resulting pain, discovery on a CT scan, and a removal surgery after that.
It does not itemize medical bills, lost wages, or a specific dollar demand. It does not quote imaging reports or operative notes beyond the suit’s own description. And it does not say which of the two named surgeries introduced the needle.
Those gaps matter in a retained-object case. Hospitals run instrument counts for a reason. When a patient later needs a scan and a second operation to pull out a 1.5-inch sharp, the public is left with the suit’s account and silence from the named defendants.
No criminal charges or government enforcement actions are described in the available account of the case. This is a civil negligence claim against the hospital and the three physicians.
Patients trust surgical teams to close them up clean. When that trust meets a CT scan years later and a needle still inside, the filing puts the burden back where it belongs, on the people and the institution that held the instruments.
