When 40-year-old Kalawati (name changed) walked in with a complaint of stomach pain, the doctor thought it was another routine case until an ultrasound scan showed him that her right kidney was “missing”.
A perplexed Dr Vinay Kumar, a radiologist based in Uttar Pradesh’s Moradabad town, about 350 km from here, launched a search for the right kidney and, to his shock, found it in her chest!
“The left kidney was at its place but the right one was in the chest, which was revealed by the X-Ray....Kalwati, however, did not have any problems related to the kidneys,” Dr Kumar said.
He said the patient had complained of stomach pain but that seemed to be owing to some other reasons. “It’s found in the rarest of rare cases and termed trans diaphragmatic thoracic ectopic kidney....Kalwati had been living a normal life...her urea and creatinine levels, which are among the indicators of normal renal function, were normal, Dr Kumar told Deccan Herald from Moradabad.
He said it was a congenital defect and there was no need to perform any kind of surgery in such cases. “Though ectopic kidneys do not normally create problems, the patients having such kidneys are prone to diseases like kidney stone or tuberculosis of kidney,” Dr Kumar added.