Doctor seeks Guinness fame after removing over 14,000 gallstones

TOKAT

A doctor in the Black Sea province of Tokat has applied to Guinness World Records after taking out more than 14,000 stones from a patient’s gallbladder.

“We took out 14,387 stones in total, and we counted them in the presence of a notary public,” Vahit Mutlu, the doctor who operated on 64-year-old Kemal Doğru, told the Demirören News Agency.

Doğru was hospitalized some 40 days ago with complaints of persistent abdominal ache. After being diagnosed with hepatitis at first, he got treated for a week, but the bellyache continued to bother him.

“When I examined him, I realized that his gallbladder was three times bigger than normal,” Mutlu said. “We directly took him into operation.”

During the operation, the doctor got amazed while taking the stones with different dimensions out of the gallbladder.

“At first sight, I knew that the amount of the stones would be a world record,” he noted.

The latest record about stones taken out from a human body also belonged to a Turk. “In an operation in [the eastern province of] Malatya, one of my colleagues had taken out 8,422 stones from a patient’s gallbladder,” Mutlu proudly said, while reminding that he, as a doctor, will be the owner of a new record.

Doğru, who got rid of thousands of stones in a one-and-half-hour operation, is also shocked.

“I came to the hospital with an ache in my abdominal region. After some medication, I had an operation,” he said.

When asked how he lived with thousands of stones for years, he replied with laughter that “I was not aware.”

Now both the doctor and the patient are waiting for an answer from the Guinness World Records committee.