Vomiting gallstones as a presenting feature of small bowel obstruction secondary to inflammatory stricture

Patients presenting with symptoms caused by gallstones are common on a surgical take. Understanding the different ways in which this common condition can present is important to enable the correct diagnosis and thus management plan. The immediate management of gallstones depends on the presenting features and can range from analgesia to surgical intervention. Obstructive cases require intervention, either by ERCP or surgery; the non-obstructive cases are usually left to settle before an elective operation at a later date. In surgery, the presence of a clinical sign where it ‘should not be’ can be a sign of another underlying pathology and this is the embodiment of surgery—to assimilate seemingly disparate pieces of information and act in a way to treat the cause. This case study highlights a rare presentation of one disease state, in vomiting of gallstones, that raised the diagnosis of another pathology, a small bowel obstruction.