After a surgeon left a towel inside Angie Perry's abdomen eight years ago, the Air Force has offered her $50,000 to settle the medical claim.

Perry's records indicate that a towel was left inside her body during a cesarean section at Yakota Air Force Base in Tokyo in 2013.

After five years, the towel was discovered and removed in 2018. She wants $1 million for the settlement.

Her surgery at Yakota was chaotic, according to Perry. She had surgery with a new, inexperienced surgeon who no longer works there. Perry left the surgery with her new baby after experiencing a massive rush of frantic activity. “I thought for sure I was going to die right there,” she said.

Over the next few years, she experienced a series of chronic health issues, and it wasn’t until a CT scan in 2018 that the towel was discovered.

The pain Perry suffered for three years led to the distance between her and her husband and child.

After consulting with six gastrointestinal specialists and several visits to the emergency room over a five-year period, an examination of Perry's stomach showed the towel. It was removed as was a piece of her small intestine on Oct. 31, 2018.

Perry was offered $50,000 as part of a settlement from a Yokota law firm.

Yokota was sued in April 2019 by Perry who hired a medical malpractice lawyer in Texas. Yokota's settlement offer is not one she intends to accept, and she is looking for a different lawyer to continue the legal battle.

The Department of Defense has tracked mistakes of this sort in its annual TRICARE Program report since 2016, but the number of instances of a foreign object left inside a patient has declined since then.

Previously, there was little recourse available to patients who were injured by military surgeons because suing DOD was banned. That ban ended in 2020, but there is a two-year statute of limitations and doesn’t allow patients to sue medical facilities located on overseas military installations. They are only allowed to file administrative claims.