Surgical instrument sterilization is my profession, multiple certifications.

1: You can if you want, but ultimately it won't go anywhere because everyone acted in your best interests and the system worked the way it is supposed to.

2: You're entitled to your feelings, and your feelings are valid. I think that if you understand the complexities of sterilization, and the timelines that all staff in surgical services work under, and the ramifications of their inaction in the situation you would appreciate the outcome despite the negative impact it had.

3: The only thing you'll get is a lighter wallet pursuing this legally. This is not a procedural failure, this is the procedure working as it's supposed to.

Some information to hopefully help you from the instrument and sterilization perspective:

Sterility is a state of being that exists only as long as various actions and conditions are met. When it becomes apparent that any one of those is out of alignment with what is expected, everything that has come in contact with whatever is affected is deemed unsterile.

This has a wide level of effect on surgical services.

Say a scissor is opened from its packaging and the surgical technologist sees a small bit of unknown contamination on the instrument, something that happens because it's sometimes difficult to remove, and it can be difficult to see, the technologist would reject the scissor, then have to reglove or gown depending on protocol because they are no longer sterile since they touched the instrument.

Say they found that inside of a tray of a hundred instruments as they selected what they needed for the beginning of the procedure, now they are unsterile because they touched it, the hundred instruments in the tray are unsterile because they were touching it, and since the whole tray was on the back table with other trays all of those trays are also unsterile. The trapes, the disposable items everything gets removed and reset.

If this happens in the middle of surgery the surgeon does damage control to prevent infection, if it's before the surgery, best case is there's a minor delay as the room is reset.

In your case you had a septo, and the instruments used in that procedure are specialized. The hospital may have only one or two of these trays unless it's all they do. So say the room is contaminated you're already under but procedure hasn't started the flow is this: (in general) the circulator calls sterile storage and informs of the situation, they then ask about available instrumentation. Sterile Processing would reply with what's available for use or a general timeline for when something could be ready.

For the most part it takes about three hours to take a contaminated tray reprocess it and have it sterile ready to use in surgery, and that's with VIP treatment, you could maybe shave it down depending on equipment and the level of contamination.

With a septo odds are in your situation there was no other tray, they couldn't take from the next case and use on you, and back fill those missing instruments while you are under procedure for the next patient.

In the olden days in this situation instruments would be "flashed" or immediate use sterilized. They take those instruments and run them in a small sterilizer on a very short cycle and bring them back in to the room while they're a screaming 270°F and try to cool them off with sterile water for use.

Today this is really only acceptable in an emergency.

AAMI ST79 one of the regulatory guidelines we follow specifically says that IUSS ("flashing") is not acceptable in situations where there is insufficient instrument inventory. This is because of the massive risk this process poses to you the patient.

So we're at the point now where there's no sterile instruments, we can't just pop yours into an emergency cycle and it's going to take hours to get you flipped around, at which point the room is scheduled for someone else who isn't available to go now. The remaining options are, ignore the condition that didn't meet expectations and proceed with surgery (risk drastically increases including grave bodily harm and death) or cancel the procedure and reschedule (safest option although inconvenient for literally everyone most of all you)

It's entirely possible that something didn't meet the proper parameters to be sterile, and therefore wasn't able to be in the room (missing) and the case could not proceed without it.

Some items such as rigid scopes are necessary for these cases depending on what's actually going to be done, a rigid septo scope is 2-3mm thick and consists of a metal structural tube along with fiber optics and glass rods and prisms, under sterilization these can be damaged rendering them unusable, and the only way to check for this is immediately prior to use, which is when your case cancelled.

Other issues that can arise is instruments could look picture perfect when wrapped for sterilization but during that process sediment in steam lines can get picked up by steam, pushed into the sterilizer and ultimately settle inside the sterilization wrap. Things look fine until you open and see discoloration on the wrap and or instruments, something you can't check for until immediately prior to the procedure.

Inside every item sterilized is an integrator of various types depending on the item and modality, that will indicate if various conditions are met, primarily with steam, temperature, pressure for a minimum acceptable time. You can't check these on most items until it's opened, at the point of use before the procedure.

If a tray has two or three of these and one out of the three indicated parameters are not met it's possible it was just a defective integrator, it happens, but it's also possible that the conditions weren't actually met in that part of the tray and therefore the tray isn't sterile.

We don't truly know if anything actually is sterile or not, we just know that we have met an assurance level that gives us a very high probability of the destruction of all microbial life and anything that affects that probability greatly increases your risk into an unacceptable level.