On November 23 this year, the Sawai Man Singh Hospital at Jaipur in Rajasthan saw its gastro-surgeons shocked, when they ended up removing a whopping 11,816 stones from the gallbladder of a 46-year-old businessman.
It took almost three days to zero in on the exact number of stones, said one of the surgeons who had to resort to his family’s help in counting them.
Even the size of the gallbladder was twice the size of a normal one. The absence of bile and the presence of the gallstones made the surgery both a complicated and a risky one.
The patient, Vinod Sharma- a native of Bakalpur in Mathura- had suffered from abdominal pain for the past two years. “I consulted many other hospitals, but did not find any relief", he said to The Times Of India.
A CT scan failed to diagnose the same. An associate professor at the department of general surgery, Dr Jeevan Kankaria confirmed to TOI that the CT scan report had just suggested a possibility of stones: “We suspected that the patient was suffering from Acalculous cholecystitis -an inflammatory disease of the gallbladder- without evidence of gallstones. Only when we conducted the surgery, did we realise that the gallbladder was full of stones.”
Fortunately no stones were found in Vinod’s Common Bile Duct (CBD), a condition which could have aggravated the problem and caused jaundice, he added.
Reports claim that the stones were almost the same size, with the largest one measuring 3.2mm, while few others were 2mm or 2.5mm in size.
Doctors say that gallbladder stones usually have a brownish tint due to the formation of cholesterol. There exist three distinct kinds of stones- cholesterol stone, pigment stone and mix stone.
In Vinod’s case, stones were blackish in colour, with 30% cholesterol and 70% pigment. "It could be because of diabetes that the patient had so many stones as diabetes does tend to aggravate such problems," Dr Kankaria said.
The samples have now been sent to the laboratory for further analysis of the cause.
TOI reported that the patient had been admitted to the hospital on 17 November in a not-so-good condition. But failure to control his sugar levels delayed the surgery.
It was only on November 23 that they were able to laproscopically operate on the patient. This technique involves making small incisions on the patient’s body and is used in cases of diabetes, immense swelling and severe infection. Vinod’s surgery was done through just a 1.2cm incision in under an hour.
The patient has been discharged from the hospital, and is set to lead a normal life, despite health challenges, reports say.