14 DAY TRIAL // Doctors do have a knack for scaring the life out of their patients with their diagnoses. Still, chances are that few would ever imagine hearing a diagnosis along the line “you have a second nose growing on your back.”
Still, as it turns out, such medical oddities are not confined to the realm of science fiction. On the contrary, they are very much real, and, not too long ago, a 28-year-old woman found this out the hard way.
Information shared with the public says that, some time ago, the woman, whose identity has not yet been disclosed, presented to a medical facility in the United States, and told doctors she was experiencing back pain.
By the looks of it, this pain that the 28-year-old woman was enduring was confined to one very specific area of her back. Upon closer inspection, doctors found that the cause of the discomfort was an abnormal tissue growth.
Much to the woman's surprise, specialists in charge of handling her case soon figured out that this abnormal tissue growth was basically a second nose that was developing on her back, Daily Mail informs.
Soon after, doctors operated on the 28-year-old and removed the peculiar protuberance. They then closely examined it, and found that it was chiefly made up of nasal tissue, but that it contained bone fragments and nerve branches too.
At the time the woman went into surgery, this second nose measured about 3 centimeters (roughly 1.2 inches) in length, and was secreting a mucus-like substance. It is unclear whether or not the protuberance would have continued to grow if not removed.
This is yet to be confirmed, but the doctors who saw this case through suspect that the abnormal tissue growth was bothering the patient and causing her to experience significant back pain precisely because of the mucus-like material it was secreting.
By the looks of it, the odd protuberance started developing on the woman's back following a failed medical intervention. Thus, about 8 years before being hospitalized in the United States, she had tissue from her nose implanted in her spine by doctors in Portugal.
The procedure was intended to cure the woman's paralysis. More precisely, stem cells in the nose tissue were expected to grow into neural cells, and restore the integrity of the her spine. Needless to say, this did not happen.
On the contrary, the cells that physicians at the Hospital de Egas Moniz in Lisbon got to toy with instead caused the woman to grow a nose on her back 8 years after being transplanted into her spine.