14 DAY TRIAL // Not too long ago, surgeons in India operated on a teenager and removed well over 200 teeth that they say were essentially tumors from his mouth. Once the surgery was done with, the boy was left with a set of 28 normal-looking chompers.
The boy, whose name is Ashik Gavai and who is merely 17 years old, first started feeling lousy nearly two years before his being admitted to hospital and operated on. Thus, it was 18 months before surgery that he started experiencing pain and swelling.
According to media reports concerning this bizarre medical case, the pain and the swelling chiefly took hold of the 17-year-old's lower jaw, on the right side. For quite a while, nobody managed to figure out what was wrong.
Thus, ILF Science tells us that, despite seeing doctors in his village several times, the boy started feeling worse and worse as the days went by. Eventually, his parents decided that enough was enough and took him to see specialists in Mumbai.
The same source tells us that, shortly after arriving at Mumbai's J.J. Hospital, folks here realized that something odd was growing inside the boy's lower jaw. However, no matter how many tests they performed, they failed to recognize this “something” as teeth.
Although they were pretty much clueless about what they were dealing with, surgeons decided to operate on 17-year-old Ashik Gavai. The intervention lasted for about 7 hours, during which time doctors removed 232 teeth from the boy's jaw.
Talking to the press, specialists in charge of seeing this case through explained that the teeth, pictured above, were actually tumors that had come to form inside the 17-year-old's gums due to a rare medical condition causing abnormal tissue growth. This condition is dubbed complex composite odontoma.
Of the extra teeth that were removed from Ashik Gavai's mouth, some were as big as a marble. Others were about the size of a mustard seed. Oddly enough, the tumors were neatly packed together inside the boy's jaw. To break them apart, surgeons had to use a hammer and a chisel.
“We had to resort to the age-old, now outdated, ‘chisel-mallet’ procedure to break down that hard formation as it was putting immense pressures on the jaw bone and surrounding healthy teeth,” Dr. Dhivare-Palwankar said in a statement, as cited by International Business Times.
Word has it that, following this intervention, the 17-year-old is feeling much better. It is unclear whether or not he risks having other unwanted teeth grow inside his mouth in the years to come. Doctors will closely monitor his progress and will intervene, should things take a turn for the worse.