Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Techniques to pull an old friend out of trouble

This 34 year old lady had been referred to our centre two years ago with retained CBD stones and bike duct injury following cholecystectomy.  She had a T tube placed. Her old ERCP films showed small stones (A: white arrows) and the T tube (A: red arrows ). The T tube was removed and the CBD was swept with balloon (B:white arrow shows the inflated balloon in the CBD). We placed a 10 French plastic sent of 12 cm length (C: white arrows). She was sent back to her referring centre. We had hoped to see her again after 8 weeks to remove the stent but she was lost to follow up. Fast forward two years and she expectedly developed biliary pain,  jaundice and fever. She went back to her original hospital where a diagnosis of blocked stent and biliary stones was made and she was sent to us. We saw our old stent which had extruded quite a bit forward into he duodenum (D: red arrow) and we couldn't properly place a snare to grab it. Initially we tried to pull it out using an inflated balloon placed adjacent to it in the CBD (E: blue arrow shows the stent and white arrow indicates the balloon adjacent to it). Our next move was to use a large bipod forceps (F1) to grab the stent (F2) and slide it back in the papilla (F3). The stent was now easily grabbed with snare (G: white arrow) and pulled out (H). Repeat contrast injection in the CBD showed a lot of stones (I: black arrows). A papillotomy was done (J). The routine technique if sweeping the lower CBD to gauge adequacy of papillotomy resulted in a lot of sludge being removed (K1 &  K2). The CBD was the swept with balloon (L: black arrow shows the inflated balloon in the upper CBD) which resulted in a lot of stones (M) and sludge (N)  being removed. The final cholangiogram showed a CBD clear of stones (O: red arrows). 

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