The world of medical science is often saturated with miraculous discoveries and heroic rescues. But sometimes, just sometimes, the realm of healthcare delves into the absurd, where the inexplicable and bizarre rear their heads.
In this fascinating overview of 2023, we meet patients with green, furry tongues, divers with leaking blood vessels from a dive into an underwater cave, and even a toddler whose eyes turned from brown to indigo blue after a dose of COVID-19 medication. Prepare for a journey through the year’s most astonishing medical reports, where the boundaries of the unbelievable are explored and reality is sometimes stranger than fiction.
Ringing in woman’s ear turns out to be spider
A case report published in the Journal of Medicine describes how a 64-year-old woman in Taiwan heard knocking, clicking and rustling sounds in her left ear for days, so bad that she had trouble sleeping.
This led her to an ENT clinic, where doctors discovered a spider moving in her external auditory canal, the pathway that connects the outside of the ear to the eardrum. As if that wasn’t enough, the spider had shed a hard, white exoskeleton.
A dive causes fatal blood syndrome
A diver who descended into an underwater cave developed a fatal blood syndrome called systemic capillary leak syndrome, which caused fluid to leak from his blood vessels, according to a case study published in the British Medical Journal.
His reaction was extremely rare and a strange complication of what is known as decompression sickness, in which nitrogen bubbles form in the blood when divers move quickly from the depths of the ocean to the surface.
Fortunately, the man was able to survive thanks to prompt medical attention.
A male’s tongue grows thick, green fur
After years of smoking, a 64-year-old Ohio man developed a shockingly green, hairy tongue.
He suffered the embarrassing side effect for two whole weeks before having his hairy tongue checked. Doctors at Wright-Patterson Medical Center discovered that the thick carpet of dead skin and bacteria developed after he was given a course of antibiotics.
Hairy tongue, medically known as hairy tongueis caused by a build-up of dead skin cells on the part of the tongue covered by taste buds.
Fetus removed from the brain of a one-year-old
In an extremely rare case, described in the magazine Neurologydoctors surgically removed a fetus from the brain of a one-year-old.
The fetus was the child’s identical twin – it emerged from the same fertilized egg and also shared the same placenta, but developed in a separate amniotic sac.
During pregnancy, one fetus was enveloped by the other, but the remnant remained in the skull of the remaining child, resulting in an enlarged head and delayed motor development.
New bacterial species identified after bite from stray cat
A 48-year-old man suffered an excruciating infection from a stray cat bite and rushed to A&E in Cambridge after his hand started to swell.
After both forearms turned red and began to swell and his fingers were painful and swollen, astonished medics ran tests and discovered he was infected with a previously unseen strain of bacteria.
That belonged to a family of bacteria called globicatella, but was distinct from other strains of the group by about 20 percent.
A knife drifted to the other side of a man’s stomach
A 22-year-old man from Nepal was stitched up after being stabbed with a knife, but the next day he discovered that the nearly six-inch long knife was still lodged in his abdomen.
A day later, he went to the emergency room because he had mild, persistent pain in the left side of his abdomen. Stunned doctors saw that the knife had ‘wandered’ to the other side of the man’s body, but miraculously it did so without damaging any organs nearby, the report in Cureus said.
A wriggling python parasite was pulled from a woman’s brain
A 64-year-old Australian woman reported experiencing abdominal pain and diarrhea for three weeks, followed by a dry cough and night sweats, according to a case report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Surprised doctors did an MRI scan of her brain, which showed a ghostly glow in her right frontal lobe.
Doctors removed an 8-centimetre-long red worm, which was still alive and wriggling, from her brain – the parasite normally lives in pythons.
Toddler’s brown eyes turn blue after taking COVID-19 drug
A six-month-old baby was given the antiviral drug favipiravir in Bangkok, Thailand, after being infected with the coronavirus. Just eighteen hours later, his mother noticed that his normally brown eyes had turned an indigo blue. This shocking color change was believed to be a side effect of how the body processes the drug.
The boy’s eyes returned to their usual color after the treatment was stopped.
Man suffers from painful rash after eating mushrooms
The 72-year-old man from Switzerland was left with a ‘striped’, whip-like pattern on his back after eating shiitake mushrooms.
Doctors diagnosed shiitake dermatitis, a reaction to the food.
The rash, which looked streaked and red as if the man had been seriously whipped, was caused by an exaggerated inflammatory response, doctors determined.
Tooth extraction causes bleeding in man’s brain
A man’s visit to the dentist for a tooth extraction had a shocking outcome as he was later taken to the emergency room due to bleeding in his brain caused by the procedure.
Doctors hypothesized that the bleeding was caused by a sudden increase in blood pressure after the man’s procedure.
2023-12-30 10:08:58
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