New Delhi: The stone measured 22 cm in total and weighed 60gms. It turned out globally the largest ureteric stone removed till date. The length of ureter is approximately the same.
A team of doctors in Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, New Delhi recently removed it using robot from the ureter which is the urinary pipe leading from the kidney to the bladder. The longest ureteric stone reported till now was by Taylor which was 21.5 cms .[Taylor WN. Large ureteric calculi; Report of case. J Urol. 1934;32:93–102]
What is special about the case is the fact that the patient Natasha resident of Saharanpur was completely pain free and unaware of the massive stone that lay inside her body. Such large stones were traditionally removed by open or large incision procedures. Although current technology allows many modes of treating the stone with minimal invasion, none is fool proof and may need staged attempts at complete removal.
According to Dr Sachin Kathuria, Consultant, Department of Urology, Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, “The use of surgical robot made it possible to remove such a long stone in a single surgery and allowed the stone removal with minimum scar and quick recovery .”
Kidney stones are very common occurrence in this part of the country. The large stone burden are also not uncommon and need multitude of treatment forms to remove them completely.
The team of doctors namely Dr Sachin Kathuria, Dr Ajay Sharma and Dr Vikram Batra used robot (known as Da Vinci) to completely remove stone in single stage in an exhaustive procedure lasting 4 hours.
The surgical robot is available only in a handful of hospitals and helps make the surgery scar free and recovery from it early.
The functional outcome of the surgery was very reassuring and satisfactory and patient was discharged on second say of surgery and is doing well.
It is to reiterate the fact that North India remains a stone hub and prevention can only be done by adequate fluid intake. If detected in time the surgery is scar free.
