Any good cancer specialist will tell you that tumours can come back to bite you. Eye doctors at the Regional Institute of Ophthalmology had a first hand experience of just how much ‘bite’ a tumour has, when they removed a large tumour from near a 23-year-old girl’s eye - and found two fully grown teeth inside.
“But all the teeth in my mouth are intact,” smiles Nagabhooshanam, showing her pearly whites. The girl, who hails from an economically backward family from Nellore, had a huge tumour just below her left eye, that had been growing since birth, “It had grown so large that she looked terribly disfigured. Her eyesight also suffered,” explains Dr K Vijaya, Director - RIO.
“Finding fully formed teeth inside a tumour in any part of the body is a rare phenomenon and it has only been medically documented five times before in the world,” says Dr V Kanagasabai, Dean of the Madras Medical College, to which the eye hospital is affiliated. Nagabhooshanam has lived with her deformity all her life, and the fact that her family was on the lookout for a groom for her prompted her to seek cosmetic medical assistance.
On July 26, the girl who works as a housemaid in her village, was rolled in for surgery and doctors began incising the large tumour (teratoma) that lay in the orbit around her eye. “When the tumour was fully removed from between her skin and skull, it was almost 4x2 cm in dimension,” adds the doctor. Though they had determined that it was benign (harmless) before surgery, they cut it open to find two fully formed teeth!
So how did the teeth get there? The doctor’s best guess was that this was a result of tissue displacement when the baby was in the embryonic stage. Though surprised that the unsightly lump that was in her face had two teeth inside, Nagabhooshanam is happy with her looks now.
Comments
0 comment