Doctors Reveal the Weirdest Things They’ve Ever Found in a Human Body

Author: Matt Gilligan / Source: did you know?

Doctors see a lot of odd things. Stuff we probably can’t even imagine. I have a friend who is a doctor and he’s told me some pretty crazy stories.

In this article, 15 doctors/medical examiners/morticians share the strangest things they ever found in bodies.

1. Horrifying

“A mummified foetus – I was working in Africa and the usually very stoic Congolese surgeons called me in to theatre, gagging – the patient was an elderly woman with a protruding abdominal mass. When they opened it, they found that it was a long, long dead mummified foetus which as a result of an ectopic pregnancy, had somehow managed to both wall off after it died and somehow avoid killing the mother. Her body had encapsulted the alien tissue and over the years, it had slowly eroded her anterior abdominal wall to the point where it finally caused her to have enough symptoms to get something done about it.

It was horrific and the smell was worse.

Happily, though, the patient survived the procedure and just left the surgical team with a .. memory.”

2. Don’t see that every day

“One of our cadavers had two spinal cords, aka split spinal cord malformation.

Edit: just a first year med student here folks. Unfortunately it’s against our school’s policy for me to even take photographs, yet alone share them. One of our groups during our laminectomy (removing the back of your vertebra to expose spinal cord) lab, once they cut into the dura mater (the tissue that wraps around the spinal cord) noticed a spit cord in the in the thoracolumbar region, side-by-side.
Our lead anatomist was very excited to see this and had the whole class come see. Apparently it’s not the most incredibly rare thing, but it is the weirdest anomaly I’ve seen thus far.

Edit 2: So a lot of people are mentioning Spina Bifida. From what I understand in my studies, that would be the result of bones in the spine not forming correctly. This was not what we saw. There were no signs of prior surgery or herniation of the meninges.”

3. How’d that get there?

“Weirdest thing was in a woman’s intestine- a dead mouse.

Tiny little thing…. obviously never got the chance to ask how the mouse got there as this was post mortem. Definitely unexpected though…”

4. A tough situation

“She isn’t dead, but this week i saw a patient with endometriosis in her lungs.

Somehow, womb-lining cells had travelled to her thorax and colonised on the lung. She previously had symptoms of coughing up blood while menstruating, but because the endometriosis was so severe, was on the pill to stop her periods entirely.

Then she came off it to have a baby, and after the birth, with her hormones all over the place, she developed two pulmonary embolisms (blood clots in the lung), and a few weeks after that, three successive pneumothorax (collapsed lung). The womb cells had tried to shed, and made a hole between the airways and the sac surrounding the lung, letting air escape.

She’s deciding now whether to let the surgeons cut out the part of her lung with the endometrial cells, to go back on the pill for life, or to have a full hysterectomy and remove her ovaries. Tough choice at 32.”