A 51-year-old patient had an incredible number of gallstones removed by an Indian surgeon, setting a new world record.
Minati Mondal, the patient in question, complained of excruciating abdominal discomfort when she was taken to Debdoot Sevayan Hospital in Kolkata, West Bengal, in eastern India.
Tests performed by gastroenterologist and endosurgeon Dr. Makhan Lala Saha revealed that Mondal’s gallbladder was the source of her pain and acid reflux.
Dr. Saha was able to remove 11,950 gallstones following the hour-long laparoscopic procedure. The nurse took a while to count them all.
They said that they did expect a large number of gallstones, but they never believed a new world record would be set up.
“I was astonished to see the large number of stones that we extracted from the gall bladder of this patient. I had never thought that a gall bladder could contain so many stones.
“It took my assistants four hours to count the number of the stones that were between 2mm and 5mm in size. It took us 50 minutes to remove them.”
Dr. Saha has written to the Royal College of Pathologists in London to keep the specimen in the museum.
“Two months ago, I had operated on a girl who had 1,110 stones but despite the shocking number, I found that in 1983, doctors in Britain had removed 3,110 stones from a German patient’s gall bladder.
“But I feel this number can replace the past record since the current number is three times more than the record.”
The patient was released from the hospital after a two-day stay and is feeling just fine.
Gallstones are hardened deposits of digestive fluid that can form in the gallbladder. They range in size from as small as a grain of sand to as large as a golf ball. Gallstones can cause sharp, intense pain in the upper right part of the abdomen known as biliary colic.
