Erbil surgeon extracts 537 stones from woman’s gallbladder

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — A doctor in Erbil has told Rudaw of a "rare and difficult" operation he performed last week on a patient who had 537 stones in her gallbladder.

Though the presence of hundreds of stones in gallbladders has been recorded before, Dr. Saman Tahir, the general surgeon and laparoscopy specialist who performed the operation on Sunday, said that he believes 537 to be the highest number of stones ever extracted from a patient in the Kurdistan Region.

“There have been patients with 400 stones in their gallbladder,” Dr. Tahir told Rudaw’s Rawchi Hassan on Wednesday. 

Tahir performed the two-hour long operation at Paky Private Hospital, in the Newroz neighbourhood of Erbil.

The patient, Nasrin Shafiq, is now convalescing at home.

"I'm weary and in a lot of pain at night, but thank God my surgery was successful," 65-year-old Shafiq, a native of Kirkuk, told Rudaw.

The gallbladder is a small pouch that stores bile produced by the liver above it. Bile plays a major role in the digestive process.

Gallstones are thought to develop because of a chemical imbalance in the make-up of bile. In most cases, the levels of cholesterol in bile become too high and the excess cholesterol forms stones.

Gallstones are a common affliction, and most patients who have them show no symptoms. However, they can cause intense pain if they become lodged in ducts.

The patient also had to undergo surgery to extract a stone from her common bile duct near the gallbladder, Dr. Tahir said, making performance of the operation all the more difficult.

Translation by Khazan Jangiz