A 55-year-old man went to the hospital for a stroke. He left minus a 3.1kg rock that had been quietly growing inside him for a decade, shattering medical records in the process.
You go to the hospital because you had a stroke. You expect them to check your brain and your heart. You do not expect the surgical team to pull a rock the size of an ostrich egg out of your lower abdomen.
That is exactly what happened in Trincomalee, a coastal city in eastern Sri Lanka.
A 55-year-old man was admitted to the local hospital last week to recover from a stroke. But while checking him over, nurses noticed he was having a terrible time just trying to urinate. The doctors took a closer look and found the blockage.
It was a bladder stone. But not a normal one.
When the surgical team finally got it out, it weighed 3.1 kilograms. That is nearly seven pounds. It is the exact weight of a full-term newborn baby, and it measured about 17 centimeters long.
Dr. Prahalahan Balakrishnan led the surgery. He knew right away they were looking at something completely wild.
“According to available records, it is the largest bladder stone ever documented and removed through surgery,” Dr. Balakrishnan told reporters.
Bladder stones happen when minerals in urine crystallize because the bladder is not emptying all the way. Usually, they are the size of sand. Sometimes they grow to a centimeter. Anything over four centimeters is considered giant.
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This one was in a league of its own. The doctor estimates it had been quietly growing inside the man for five to ten years.
To put it in perspective, the old Guinness World Record for a bladder stone was set in Brazil back in 2003. That one weighed 1.9 kilograms. The stone pulled out in Sri Lanka blew past that mark by more than a kilo.
The patient is still in the hospital recovering from his stroke, but doctors say he is in very good health.
The human body can hide a lot of heavy secrets for a very long time. Sometimes it takes a completely unrelated emergency to finally drag those secrets out into the light.
