Surgeons in northern China removed a 79-year-old woman's gallbladder to treat gallstones and a blocked bile duct. The stones were there, as expected. But when a soft stone from her gallbladder was split open after surgery, a thin metal object about 2 centimeters long, or roughly three-quarters of an inch, sat at its core.
She had no history of bile duct procedures that might have left material behind. The surgical team concluded the metal was something she had swallowed, which pierced the wall of her stomach, then the wall of her gallbladder, and stayed there while a gallstone formed around it. The case, from Kailuan General Hospital in Tangshan, Hebei province, was published May 15 in Frontiers in Medicine.
