• How many different places in the human body can grow plants?
What happened when a man decided to take a bath with eels?
These are 15 of the weirdest – and sometimes the grossest – things found growing inside
people.
15 – Guinea Worm • The guinea worm is technically considered
a medical condition.
The parasites live in contaminated water.
• When people drink that water, they ingest the eggs and larva of the guinea worm.
Then it grows to be three feet long inside them, and creates a burning rash on the surface
of the skin where it leaves the body.
• People with the rash end up dipping it in a lake or stream to cool it, at which point
the parasite releases more eggs into the water and the cycle continues.
• Luckily, sustained efforts have the guinea worm on the verge of extinction.
Only two confirmed cases occurred in 2016.
14 – Hairball • An 18-year-old girl in Kyrgyzstan nearly
died of dehydration and malnourishment because she wasn’t able to eat or drink anything.
• When she went to see a doctor about it, they found that the cause was a 9-pound hairball
blocking her entire stomach.
• This was the result of years of her obsessive habit of eating hair and pieces of carpet.
13 – Dandelion • The parents of a Chinese toddler didn’t
think all that much of it when a dandelion seed fell in her ear.
• But four months later, when she started crying and scratching at her ear, they decided
to check it out.
• Apparently the flower had grown to full size inside her ear, had taken root, and was
blocking her entire ear canal.
• It took some of the best specialists in the country 10 minutes to remove the flower
in a delicate surgery.
12 – Guava sprout • If you heard that a guava sprout started
growing inside a human, where would you think it would be?
The ears?
Nose?
Belly button?
• Nope.
Try a tooth.
Somehow, this guy’s dental hygiene was so bad, he managed to grow a guava sprout in
the cavity of his tooth.
• Somehow it didn’t hurt badly enough for him to see a dentist until AFTER the plant
started growing.
11 – Brain worm • Rosemary Alvarez thought the problem she
was having was a brain tumor, so she had it operated on.
• Once the doctors were in, they found a type of tapeworm that had burrowed in and
was literally eating her brain.
• They removed it and she made a full recovery.
But the real bad news is how she got it.
• The only way that type of tapeworm could have made it into her body and to her brain…
is if someone had served her food tainted with feces that were infected with the worm.
10 – Maggots • Aaron Dallas thought he just had a case
of shingles or gnat bites on his head… until they started moving.
• It turned out he had maggots – the larva of botflies, that he most likely got during
a summer trip to Belize.
• He had five of them, and he apparently could hear them moving around inside his head.
9 – Brain teratoma • The word “teratoma” comes from the
Greek words for “monstrous tumor.”
And yeah, that’s pretty much what this is.
• The 26-year-old doctoral student that had this massive tumor in her brain had probably
been carrying some form of it around since birth.
• These types of tumors occur when a piece of an embryo breaks away and then rejoins
the fetus, very early in the pregnancy.
• That piece sort of loses the overall game plan, and so it just tries to become an entire
human all by itself – INSIDE the existing human.
This is why the girl referred to the tumor as her “twin sister.”
8 – Fetus growing inside of a man • It turns out men can also carry their
malformed twins around late into life!
• Sanju Bhagat carried his twin brother around as a fetus until he was 36 years old.
Then, he finally got his gigantic stomach looked at by a doctor.
When doctors operated, they found the mutated body of his fetal twin brother, complete with
bones, hair, and even fingernails.
• In some cases, the fetus can even grow an umbilical cord.
7 – Pea plant • In terms of plants growing in people,
we’ve gotten a dandelion in the ear, and a guava sprout in the tooth.
• So where could a pea plant grow?
• A Massachusetts man was ready to hear a cancer diagnosis, but instead, was told
there was a pea plant growing in his lung.
• Naturally, his dinner in the hospital that night included peas.
6 – Cricket • An Indian man went to the doctor for a
“strange itch” in his ear.
• Not long after, doctors were pulling a live cricket out of his ear.
• It was a common house cricket, and the assumption is it crawled in while he was asleep,
and was just waiting until it got dark again to come back out.
5 – Eel • A 56-year old Chinese man bought some
eels at a market because he heard that small fish could help eat dead skin off the body.
• That’s already weird.
But then one of them swam right into his penis and moved up his urethra.
• By the time he made it to a doctor, it had made it all the way into his bladder.
4 – Fir tree • The pea plant that had been found growing
inside someone’s lung probably just went down the wrong tube while they were eating.
• The seed of this fir tree was apparently inhaled, and grew to be about five centimeters
tall inside a Russian man’s lung before it was surgically removed.
3 – Monster tumor complete with teeth and hair
• This is another “teratoma” tumor, that grew to be about the size of a watermelon
in a British woman’s chest… while she was pregnant.
• Apparently, the tumor had been sitting idle for a long time, but started to grow
in response to pregnancy horomones.
• When the tumor was removed, it – like most teratoma tumors – included hair and
teeth in its composition.
2 – Squid babies • Calamari is a delicacy in many parts of
the world, and especially in South Korea.
And unlike most parts of the world, when you get squid in Korea, sometimes the internal
organs are still intact.
• So when one woman bit into a partially-cooked squid, she felt a prickling sensation.
• That was apparently the feeling biting into the squid’s sperm sac, and her mouth
being impregnated with a dozen squid babies.
• They weren’t fully-formed squid, and they were removed almost immediately, but
still…
1 – Potato sprout • Let’s recap – we’ve had the ear
dandelion, the tooth guava, and both a pea plant and a fir tree in the lung.
• Where else can we grow something inside our bodies?
Why not a potato in the vagina?
• How, you might ask, did a potato get up there?
Well, the poor woman’s mother told her to put it there…
as a form of contraception.
• So she did.
And then it started to sprout.
But as far as we know, she didn’t get pregnant.
So that’s… something.