A woman arrived at the emergency department in hospital with a horrible stomach ache, had doctor in shock after what they discovered.
The doctor was astonished when she removed 11,950 gallstones from a patient –which is possibly a new world record.
Dr. Makhan Lala Saha, a gastrointestinal endo surgeon, removed these stones from fifty one year old Minati Mondal’s gall bladder which is considered to be a milestone surgery.
It appears Mondal was suffering from chronic abdominal pain and acid reflux for almost eight weeks before being admitted to Debdoot Sevayan Hospital in Kolkata, West Bengal, in eastern India.
Following a series of routine tests and ultrasounds, doctors discovered she was suffering from a severe case of gallstones.
Dr Saha, who removed the huge cluster in an hour-long laparoscopic surgery, said he was anticipating a large number of stones but was still shocked when the number crossed the 5,000 mark.
He said: “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.”
The doctor has written to the Royal College of Pathologists in London to keep the specimen in the museum.
Now it transpires that the huge amount of gallstones removed could be a new world record.
Dr. Saha added: “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.”
Mondal has since been discharged from the hospital two days ago and is now recovering at home.
Gallstones are small stones, usually made of cholesterol, that form in the gallbladder. Although common they don’t generally need to be treated.
However, if a gallstone becomes trapped in a duct (opening) inside the gallbladder it can trigger a sudden intense abdominal which is known as biliary colic.
