They Found a Tiny Tree Growing in Man’s Body

The 28-year-old patient shows up at the hospital with distressing symptoms. He explained to the doctors that he felt really bad chest discomfort and had been coughing badly for quite some time. The medical staff knew right away there was no time to waste, so he was scheduled for an X-ray. Weirdly, there was nothing unusual about the X-ray results. The patient just had a mass in his lungs that they needed to remove as soon as possible. Sure, it wasn’t the best news for the man, but it was certainly nothing the doctors hadn’t seen before.

But that first opinion changed on the day of the surgery. Not only was the whole operation more difficult than they’d initially expected, but the mass they removed from the patient had an unusual shape. When the probe was sent for further investigation, the doctors were puzzled: it was a small fir tree!

The doctors that had participated in the operation thought that the man must have inhaled a seed, which settled inside the man’s lungs. After the seed grew into a sapling, its little needles started to damage the tissues surrounding it, which resulted in chest discomfort and coughing.

As the story gained more popularity, scientists weighed in on the mysterious story. And they weren’t so quick to accept it, saying it was most likely made up. On one hand, most plants need a lot of sunlight to grow, which isn’t available in a human lung. More so, if it were that simple, we’d all have things growing in our bodies. Small seeds aren’t that hard to swallow or inhale, right?

This wasn’t the only story about plants growing in a human lung that baffled scientists. In 2010, a man from Massachusetts was hospitalized after his lung collapsed. Again, this didn’t seem to take doctors by surprise, as unfortunate as it was, because the patient already had a history of respiratory issues.

Nevertheless, they discovered a mass inside the man’s lung and removed it immediately. What they found was equally as surprising as the fir tree: a small pea plant! Only this time, doctors suggested that the man probably had peas for dinner, but that one simply went the wrong way and didn’t end up in his stomach as it should have. Once it reached his lungs, the small pea got comfortable and began sprouting leaves.

The truth is a bit more complex in this case, but it does make it more plausible. Turns out that the piece that was removed from the man’s lung was only about half an inch long. Something that small doesn’t really qualify as a full-grown plant. But the seed was able to grow, though.

That’s because a pea seed can sprout even without light. It naturally does that underground. The seed doesn’t need to have any light at this point, because the tiny seed has enough energy stored inside to help it grow to the level of the soil, where it gets the sunlight it needs to continue.

Because of their relationship with the sun, plants are called autotrophs — or organisms that use exposure to light to feed themselves. A lot of us think that plants get their daily menu from the soil we place them in, but that’s not “feeding” them. Plants need sunlight, water, and the gasses in the air to produce glucose — the substance they use for food. This whole process is called photosynthesis and is performed by all plants, algae, and even a bunch of microorganisms, like the purple sulfur bacteria.

Now back to our unfortunate human patient: while it’s true that the pea seed might have germinated since it had sufficient moisture in there to survive, it didn’t grow into a full-size plant. It would have needed sunlight for that so that photosynthesis could begin. That’s not to say it wasn’t damaging or dangerous. A lot of other emergency room doctors have similar stories too. Like this one coming from some doctors in Essex, whose patient initially seemed to have lost her dentures.

The woman was elderly and already had memory problems and they initially didn’t give this mistake much thought. That wasn’t until the woman was later discovered to have some other problems with her lungs too. It didn’t take them long to connect the dots and figure out that the woman’s upper dentures weren’t all lost, they were just inside her body! The woman had swallowed them but didn’t realize and they got stuck at the bottom of her throat, also causing her respiratory problems.

Not all such mishaps happen by accident. Another man in the UK wanted to offer his fiancée the engagement ring of her dreams, but it didn’t fit his budget. So, he came up with — what he believed to be — a clever plan.

He went to the jewelry parlor and patiently waited for the jeweler to shift his focus from the ring for a split second. As soon as that happened, he swallowed the ring! The jeweler wasn’t as easily tricked and called the police. Once under the metal detectors, the man could only confess. The crafty romantic was escorted to a cell, where he was expected to, ehm... pass the ring back to its rightful owner.

It’s not the only reason people were caught swallowing jewelry. A woman once came up to the emergency doctor, complaining about stomach pains. There was nothing bizarre about her. On the contrary, she was a middle-aged woman both fashionable and tidy. Her physical exam didn’t reveal anything suspicious about her.

But the X-ray they had to make sure did. As they were looking at the images, the doctors were perplexed: a whole lot of jewelry was stuck inside the woman’s stomach and intestines. The medical staff obviously questioned her about how the objects got there, and her response was even more outrageous. She said she wanted to keep her jewelry safe from her husband, which she claimed had a bad habit of gifting her jewelry to other women.

One other doctor remembered having a patient with a bottle cap stuck in his throat. The problem is he didn’t even notice he had a strange object stuck inside him, it was simply discovered at a routine checkup. Fortunately, no surgery was needed to fish this one out.

Doctors managed to get it out using a small medical net. They were curious how this man managed to get a bottle cap stuck in his throat and not even know it. His response was simple: he did remember drinking water some days prior, but he couldn’t find the cap. He brushed the whole thing off and went on with his day.

Other times, naughty things we do when we’re young can come back to haunt us years later. A 30-year-old woman surely learned this lesson the hard way, when she ended up in the emergency room with a stuffy nose. No medicine seemed to help, so she knew she had to get it examined by a professional. Once the doctors had a look, they realized she had some inflamed tissue up her nose and something that resembled a foreign object. It also looked like that object had been there for quite some time.

They couldn’t figure out what it was, so she was immediately taken to the operating room. What the surgeons removed was then taken to be further investigated, and it turned out to be some sort of material resembling paper. After they questioned her, the woman did remember having stuffed some paper in her nose when she was little but was just as surprised as the doctors that the small piece had stayed there up her nose for over 20 years.

Some extractions of foreign objects are more complicated than others. A kid ended up at the emergency room after he stuffed his brother’s plastic construction toy up his nose.

As the doctors were trying to carefully remove it, the kid coughed, and the toy went down his throat and into his stomach. Both the doctors and the kid’s family patiently waited for the boy to pass the toy out to the final destination. That’s probably because the kid wanted to give it back to his brother.