BENGALURU: When 53-year-old Mohammed Ayub went in for a gall-bladder stone removal surgery, little did he know that his case would become a talking point among medicos in the city. Ayub, who went under the scalpel at Santosh Hospital, had an astonishing 703 stones extracted from his gall-bladder, where they had resided for more than two years before being removed last month.
According to Chanchal Raj Challani, the senior surgeon who operated on Ayub, the surgery was one of the most complex that he had worked on in his career. Thankfully, Ayub survived the operation and is now on the way to recovery pleased that he managed to overcome the ordeal which the doctors in the medical fraternity rate as a unique case.
Ayub had been facing intermittent pain in the abdomen from the past two years but he kept neglecting the pain. When the pain increased, he opted for an ultrasound scan, which showed the presence of multiple stones. “The gall bladder can cause sudden pain in the upper right abdomen. This pain is called gall bladder attack and occurs when gallstones block the ducts of the biliary tract. Ayub started getting frequent attacks recently that is when he decided to come to us,” said Dr Challani.
According to Challani, gallstones may form if bile contains too much cholesterol , too much bilirubin, or not enough bile salts. The doctor pointed out that normally 15-20 or a maximum of 25 stones are detected in such cases. “It really came as a shock when I was performing the surgery. There was no way we could remove all the stones from this procedure and I needed to quickly switch to an open surgical process. What is normally done in 90 minutes took me 4 hours,” said Challani.
Another Senior General Physician, Dr Santosh Saklecha brought to light the fact that this complex surgery was a risky exercise considering that a couple of stones could have slipped into the pancreatic duct during the operation, resulting in pancreatitis which could have proved fatal.