Gallstones unfortunately have become more commonly found as people have lots of scans.
In my opinion, you only need to have them removed if they are causing some trouble.
The trouble that you can get may be some pain, you can also sometimes get them infected,
so you have fever, shakes, or sweats, or the gallstones fall out of the gallbladder and
into the liver ducts, in which case you can become jaundiced, where your eyes turn yellow
and your skin turns yellow, or you develop a condition which we call pancreatitis. I
think these are all what we call absolute indications to have your gallstones removed.
If you just have a little bit of pain, or if you've just been found to have stones,
you know, by the by, then the best thing to do it probably talk to your GP or get referred
to a surgeon and talk to them on an individual basis about whether you really need to have
them removed, and what it all involves.
The surgery to remove the gallbladder involves a general anaesthetic, where you go to sleep
fully, and also keyhole, or what we call laparoscopic surgery. Sometimes if you're healthy and it's
done early in the day, we can often do it as daycase surgery where you have the operation
and then you can go home the same day, later on in the evening. The keyhole surgery involves
four cuts usually, one at the belly button, and three more up near the ribcage. The one
at the belly button is usually the longest one, but measures usually no more than about
half an inch. The three little ones at the ribcage are almost like little stab wounds.
Through that we put a camera in, we use long instruments, and we take your gallbladder
out and free it off the liver. We put little clips on all the attachments and then we put
it into a bag and we pull it out of your belly button. The cuts that you see are usually
very nice and if all is well, you can either go home the same day or more commonly go home
the next day.
Discharge from the hospital is usually the same day or the next day, sometimes it is,
you know, quite a difficult operation or if there has been any problems then it may just
be an extra few days. Most people I would advise to take off work for two weeks, but
during those two weeks you will be able to walk around normally at home and just slowly
get back to your normal strength. If you do manual work, like quite physical lifting or
a lot of moving about, then I sometimes advise being off work for up to four weeks, because
you do spend, you know your body is trying to spend all its energy recovering, and you
can get tired quite quickly during the day if you're quite physical. But I would expect
that after about four weeks that most people were up to their full strength, if there has
been no complications.
Most people after the operation don't feel any different apart from the fact that they
lose the pain that was associated with the gallstones. Occasionally, people complain
of diarrhoea and that can be due to the bowel acids coming into the intestines a bit quicker,
and this is usually self-limiting so if you do get diarrhoea with loose stools, it usually
disappears within about 4-6 weeks. In terms of complications, there are some minor things
which are more common - every time we do an operation, we always warn about the risk of
wound infection and bleeding or bruising around the wound - these are quite easy to treat,
a wound infection is usually treated with antibiotics, bruising will usually just go
away within 2 weeks. A more serious risk is something like bowel leak, where there is
a leakage of bowel from where we've tied off the structures connect the gallbladder to
the liver, or where the raw surface that's left from the gallbladder being removed can
leak a bit of bile. This is very rare, and if it does occur then it is quite easily treated,
but it sometimes may involve another operation. We do it through keyhole, we wash it out,
and put an extra stitch in, and it solves the problem.