Fir tree man shocks doctors

A young man from the capital of Russia’s Udmurtian Republic was diagnosed with cancer, and had to undergo an operation which revealed the shocking truth – he had no cancer but… a tree growing in his lung.

It sounds like a story from Burger’s Adventures of Baron Munchhausen, when the eccentric Baron shot a cherry stone at a deer and it sprang into a cherry tree on the deer’s head.

http://russiatoday.com/Top_News/2009-04-13/Fir_tree_man_shocks_doctors.html



For 28-year-old Artyom Sidorkin, though, it was no fun at all.

As Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper found out, he often had chest pains, and was coughing up blood.

An X-Ray showed a new growth in his lung, and doctors were certain it was a cancerous one.

Fortunately, when they dissected Artyom’s chest, it was decided to cut out a small piece first, and to carry out an express biopsy test. The doctor made an incision in the lung and saw… a fir tree.

“I thought it was a hallucination,” said Vladimir Kamashev, deputy head doctor of the Udmurtian oncology hospital that was carrying out the operation. “I said to my assistant – come here and take a look…it seems as if there was a fir tree there…!


The assistant later confessed that at the first moment he thought that Kamashev went mad.





image from http://www.kp.ru

The sprout appeared to be 5 cm long. Doctors are shocked – they say Artyom could not breathe in or otherwise ingest the twig.

It means he somehow sniffed the seed – and it sprouted inside his body.

“To tell the truth, I didn’t feel I was carrying some foreign object inside me – and moreover that it was growing. But it was very painful,” Artyom said.

The piece of lung containing the fir tree was put into a special solution, as it is a unique exemplar.


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http://russiatoday.com/Top_News/2009-04-13/Fir_tree_man_shocks_doctors.html