A doctor in India set a new world record after removing a huge number of gallstones from a 51-year-old woman.
The patient, Minati Mondal, went to Debdoot Sevayan Hospital in Kolkata because she had very bad stomach pain.
After running tests, Dr. Makhan Lala Saha found that her pain and acid reflux were caused by gallstones in her gallbladder.
During a one-hour surgery, the doctor removed 11,950 gallstones. The nurse needed a lot of time to count all of them.
They said they expected many gallstones, but they didn’t think it would become a world record.
Dr. Saha said he was very surprised by how many stones they removed. He never imagined a gallbladder could hold that many.
His assistants spent four hours counting the stones, which were about 2mm to 5mm in size. The surgery to remove them took 50 minutes.
Dr. Saha also contacted the Royal College of Pathologists in London to preserve the stones in their museum.
Dr. Saha said that two months earlier, he had treated a girl who had 1,110 stones. But even though that number was high, he learned that in 1983, doctors in Britain removed 3,110 stones from a German patient.
He believes this new case can break that old record because the number of stones is three times higher.
The patient stayed in the hospital for two days and is now feeling fine.
Gallstones are hard lumps made from digestive fluids that form in the gallbladder. They can be very small like grains of sand or as big as a golf ball. These stones can cause strong pain in the upper right side of the stomach.
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