Can you imagine being told that you have a monster growing inside you?
One day you start to feel pain and that pain only gets worse.So you make an appointment
to see a doctor.
Fast-forward a few weeks and something is removed from you.
That thing, the surgeons say, is like a tiny malformed person that was growing in your
body.
If this sounds like science-fiction, we can assure you it isn’t.
The name of this thing, or tumor, is a teratoma, and that word comes from the Greek meaning
“monster” and “tumor”.
Indeed, these things might be made up of certain types of tissue and so they might contain
hair and teeth, but also muscle and bone.
In rare cases they might grow all kinds of things, so monster isn’t really an exaggeration.
Thankfully they are rare, and if they do appear they might be found in the testicles, the
tailbone or a woman’s ovaries.
We’ll first explain what these things are and who might suffer from them, and then tell
you why they can grow their own body tissues and organs.
There are two main types of teratoma and one is called a mature teratoma,and the other
an immature teratoma.
It’s the latter that pose the bigger problem because these have more of a chance of developing
into a malignant tumor.
The mature type are usually just removed and that’s it, although they can grow back again.
It’s these immature ones, often found in a woman’s ovaries, that can have a life
of their own.
These can also be worrying for parents of a newborn, because babies and children can
get them at the tailbone, either inside the body or outside.
These are called sacrococcygeal teratoma.
On top of looking scary for parents, and the child if that child is old enough to be cognizant
of what’s going on, they are painful.
The good news is they occur in something like 1 out of every 35,000 to 40,000 infants.
In women, if they develop them in the ovaries, not only might there be intense pain but they
are sometimes accompanied by something called NMDA encephalitis.
That’s a kind of brain inflammation and it has been known to cause incredibly painful
headaches and in some people mental problems including psychosis.
We found a photo of one of these tumors that had been found inside a woman, although that
woman had been dug up and was 500 years old.
The researchers who discovered the skeleton were from Portugal, and they wrote up their
findings in the International Journal of Paleopathology.
What’s so strange about this tumor, and hard to look at, is that it has a set of teeth,
albeit not a whole set.
In this case and in other ovarian teratomas, cells had multiplied abnormally and so you
get the added tissue.
The good news is that once noticed these kinds of tumors are removed and the woman is usually
back to normal quickly.
Only in a few cases do they become cancerous.
The bad news is that they often go unnoticed and inside the woman this strange tumor develops.
At some point the pain will come, and what might come out could look to have a life of
its own.
More bad news is that we found a case of one woman who had two of these things removed
at separate times, and then another grew inside of her.
You men out there are not spared from this.
You can get one in the testicles.
They can come at any age, but the most common period is from the age of 20 to 30.
We found a case of a 37-year old man who’d had a pain in his groin for about a month
although he didn’t at first visit the hospital.
When he did it was bad news, because it was a metastatic teratoma, meaning cancer had
spread around his body.
We should say that the National Institutes of Health says this is very, very rare.
To all our male viewers, the experts say catching these things early is very important, so if
you feel pain down there don’t be afraid to visit a doctor and let him have a look.
That might be embarrassing for some people, but hey, it’s better to know.
The survival rate is much higher when the disease is in the early stages.
We know these things can grow hair and teeth because of abnormal cell growth, but just
how much can they grow.
How developed could this thing become?
The National Institutes of Health wrote about cases in which the teratoma had developed
a lot.
It said teeth are common, especially in women, but added that the teratoma might grow body-like
structures, and so turned into what it called a “homunculus.”
This word comes from Latin and means “Little Person”, so this tumor is likened to a small
person growing inside a person.
We’ve seen a photo of a teratoma that grew inside a 40-year woman, and hers had developed
a lot.
While it’s not exactly a person, this thing did have molars, hair, sebaceous glands and
neural tissue.
It gets even stranger, because in 2017 Japanese surgeons found a teratoma in a young girl
and hers had grown a small brain, as well as hair, bone and teeth.
What was actually an operation to remove the 16-year old’s appendix turned into something
different when the surgeons noticed the little monster, and on inspection it was found to
have a tiny, malformed brain.
The Science media wrote about this, saying, “Not only did her egg cell divide, those
new cells took on the form of hair follicles and a thin layer of bone covering a brain-like
structure resembling a brainstem and cerebellum.”
The good news is that the girl was ok.
In 2002 there was another case in Japan that was even more strange, and this was reported
by The National Institutes of Health.
A 25-year old woman in Japan had gone in to have an ovarian cyst removed and surgeons
found something surprising.
They reported seeing what they called a “little doll-like structure.”
The surgeons said this really was a homunculus, stating what they found had grown a brain,
an eye, an ear, teeth, spinal nerves, a thyroid gland, bones, bone marrow, a gut, a trachea,
blood vessels, and phallic cavernous tissue.
If you don’t know what that last part means, it is a penis, or part of a penis.
The eye by the way was in the middle of the forehead, so it was kind of a cyclops.
It also had thick eyelashes.
The phallus was in the right place, right between the legs.
From what we can see, this Japanese woman had the most fully-formed little human yet
reported.
There are other reports, too, with perhaps the misleading and hyperbolic headline stating
that women had grown an “evil twin”.
They are not twins, they are tumors.
There was a case in the U.S. where it was first reported that a woman had grown an embryonic
twin, but no, it was a teratoma.
One woman in the US actually joked she’d grown an evil twin, but she said that because
the thing had caused her so much pain.
It had also grown hair and teeth, so was perhaps not exactly something she wanted inside of
her.
So there you go, now you know something about teratomas and the possibility of a little
person growing inside of you.
We imagine you feel much better now, or perhaps not.
What would you do if you found one of these things growing inside you?
Tell us in the comments.
And now for more bizarre things inside of people go watch “Crazy Unexpected Things
That Were Found Inside of People.”
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.