Strange stone removed in 70-year-old woman’s womb

The stone operation, according to surgeons who spoke to Pyramid Trust, was the first of its kind carried out in the state and equally, the first so far detected and removed in any part of the country of recent. Weighing three centimetres in diameter, it perforated the gall bladder and caused intestinal obstruction, according to […]

The stone operation, according to surgeons who spoke to Pyramid Trust, was the first of its kind carried out in the state and equally, the first so far detected and removed in any part of the country of recent.

Weighing three centimetres in diameter, it perforated the gall bladder and caused intestinal obstruction, according to surgical reports.

Indo thoughT it was a spiritual problEm: The 70-year-old Malama Indo Bashir of Kusa village in Jibiya Local Government Area of Katsina State, told Pyramid Trust that even though she lived with the disease for years in a malnourished state, she and her family had all along thought it was a spiritually induced disease.

She said members of her family had, over the years, tried all herbal cures available but all was in vain and finally resorted to prayers before the last bolt of attack that got her admitted into the hospital.

In the last one year, according to Indo, mother of five, she hardly ate anything except water and vomited anything she. The abdominal pain was unbearable, saying, however, that the removal made her feel like a young girl, and thanked the experts for operating on her successfully.

The Egyptian expert who led the operation, Dr Atef Issa, said, had the patient waited longer, she would have died because the intestinal obstruction had degenerated into a serious blockage. Coupled with her age, the case would have become complicated.

HOW IT WAS REMOVED: The removal, according to Dr Issa, was done through a mid line incision by a laprotomy to open the abdomen and carefully remove the stone via the intestine since, it could not be removed directly from the gal bladder.

The Egyptian experts who had never undertaken such an operation before described it as a rare stone found only in books. It has never been recorded even in Egyptian hospitals.

In the same vein, a consultant surgeon and Medical Director, Federal Medical Centre (FMC), Katsina, Dr Abdulmajid Umar said, though the case was documented in the medical books, it was not recorded in his over 15 years of medical practice.

He said, the stone was extremely a rare finding in hundreds of stone cases, such as a kidney stone and appendices, which he described as regular ailments being recorded in hospitals and various clinics across the state.   

A MEDICAL BREAK-THROUGH: Also, another consultant, Dr A. Abubakar, said recording such medical incident was a significant breakthrough for the state-owned general hospital which, he said, will serve as a guide to surgeons in case it was experienced in future.

Pyramid Trust gathered also that a scissors left in another woman’s womb during one of the operations was also detected and removed by the same Egyptian consultant. The affected woman named Hafsat Aliyu, was, however, hale and hearty after the operation, even as she declined to make further comments to our correspondent, saying “I thank God for everything as I would have been history now and I’d rather stop at that”.