Hem-o-lok clips have been widely used in laparoscopic or robot-assisted surgery. We report a case of an incidentally discovered Hem-o-lok migration into the bladder after laparoscopic radical prostatectomy. The patient was a 75-year-old man with localized prostate cancer who underwent laparoscopic radical prostatectomy in July 2009. At 3 postoperative years, follow-up ultrasonography revealed a small round mass in the bladder. No lower urinary tract symptoms were reported, and urinalysis results had never indicated hematuria or pyuria. Cystoscopy revealed a Hem-o-lok clip in the bladder, near the vesicourethral anastomotic site. We could not remove it with forceps in the outpatient clinic, so we performed the procedure again under general anesthesia and successfully removed the Hem-o-lok clip. To our knowledge, this is the first report of an asymptomatic Hem-o-lok migration into the bladder.
Asian journal of endoscopic surgery. 2017 Jun 15 [Epub ahead of print]
Junpei Iizuka, Yasunobu Hashimoto, Tsunenori Kondo, Toshio Takagi, Keisuke Hata, Taichi Kanzawa, Hidekazu Tachibana, Kazuhiko Yoshida, Kazunari Tanabe
Department of Urology, Prostate Cancer Center, Tokyo Women's Medical University, Tokyo, Japan.