14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this month, a team of surgeons in China operated on a man complaining of intense abdominal pain and removed as many as 420 stones from his left kidney.
The intervention lasted a couple of hours and was performed at the Dongyang People's Hospital in China's Zhejiang province. The man now feels much better and his doctors expect he will soon make a full recovey.
As for the 420 stones of all shapes, sizes and even colors that were removed from his left kidney, word has it that the patient intends to keep them as a souvenir of sorts.
How did the man get this many kidney stones?
According to the medical experts who handled this case, the 55-year-old patient, identified as He Dong, is a big fan of tofu, a food made by coagulating soy milk and then pressing the resulting curds into cheese-like blocks.
The thing is that, unfortunately, his hatred of water appears to be about as great as his love for tofu. Hence the fact that, after years and years of eating loads of tofu and drinking very little water, the man developed his small army of kidney stones.
Specialists explain that tofu contains significant amounts of calcium sulphate, which is added to the dish as a coagulant. In time, the calcium sulphate built up in the 55-year-old man's left kidney and all but destroyed it.
“Soy products, especially gypsum tofu, are very high in calcium, the excess of which cannot be excreted from body without a sufficient intake of water,” said specialist Wei Yubin in an interview.
“I have never seen so many stones before. At the end of the operation I realized my arms and legs were numb. The plate used to collect the stones had at least 420 of them of varying sizes and colored green and yellow,” he added, as cited by Tech Times.
Apart from the 420 stones that were removed by doctors in surgery, it is understood that, while hospitalized, He Dong also passed about 100 other stones naturally.
Mind you, this odd case was not a world record
As bizarre as this medical case might have been, the fact of the matter is that 55-year-old He Dong and his 420 kidney stones did not set a new world record.
On the contrary, the record for the most kidney stones pulled from a patient is held by a man in India who, back in 2009, had surgeons remove as astounding 172,155 stones from his left kidney in a 3-hour-long operation.
