Watch: Hospital in Dubai saves life of expat with monster kidney stone
Egg-sized stone smashed with special probe and sucked out after small incision in flank
Dubai: In a surgery carried out for the first time, a Dubai hospital recently saved the life of a patient suffering from an unusually large kidney stone, the size of a chicken egg.
The stone was broken down into smaller pieces using the latest ultrasound technology that involved only minimal surgical intervention.
Lebanese expat Habib Al Berry, 47, consulted Dr Michel Jabbour, consultant urologist at Emirates Hospital in Dubai and was diagnosed with an unusually large kidney stone called “stag horn”. He was suffering from kidney pain for over seven years and had visited many doctors, who had advised a full-blown surgery with incisions on the kidney to a remove the stones. Since Al Berry was averse to an open surgery, he was looking for an alternative to solve his problem.
Rare stone
Speaking to Gulf News, Dr Jabbour said: “This kind of stone is very rare. A stag horn is a large collection of saturated stones that begins in the renal pelvis where the urine collects and branches out to cover the entire kidney. These stones are triggered by an infection and the bacteria begins building up the mass. The stone is called by this name because it quickly branches out and resembles the horns of a stag.
He added: "A stag horn can be very dangerous as it can trigger infection in the entire kidney and cause sepsis. In the case of this patient, his creatinine levels and other parameters were out of balance and he could have lost the kidney had it not been excised.”
Dr Jabbour said Al Berry’s his kidney stone measured about 6.6cm square, as large as a chicken egg. “This is actually 10 times the size of average kidney stones which usually measure about six millimetres.”
How the procedure was done
He added: “I used an ultrasonic device with a special probe, made just a small 6mm incision in the patient’s flank to introduce the probe and the scope. With the help of the probe, we disintegrated the stone into very small pieces and sucked it out. This eliminated the stone. Within a few hours of surgery, the patient’s kidney function was stable and his creatinine levels came down. The surgery was performed in under 90 minutes.”
Dr Jabbour said this was the first time that the procedure was carried out using the advanced device in Dubai.
Al Berry expressed relief at being rid of the problem in a way that involved minimal surgery and was happy to resume his normal life within a week.