When 26-year-old Ph.D. student Yamini Karanam began having trouble with her listening and reading comprehension, she grew more and more concerned. The condition got so severe that it became difficult to understand conversations and every day situations. Eating and talking became painful. Headaches became more frequent and severe. It got so bad that she couldn’t even walk! However, no diagnostic procedures were successfully diagnosing or treating the problem. As the tumor grew larger, Yamini became sicker.
Then, one day, her doctors diagnosed her with a brain tumor. They were afraid it was cancerous. However, as Yamini mentally prepared for surgery, the doctors made a shocking discovery that went viral.
When surgeons at the Skull Base Institute in Los Angeles started to extract the mass, they realized that what grew inside Yamini’s brain wasn’t a cancerous tumor at all. It was actually a “teratoma” — or Yamini’s embryonic twin. Like something out of a sci-fi movie, the teratoma contained bone, hair, teeth and all. The surgeon was able to remove the twin using a “keyhole surgery” requiring one tiny incision in the brain. While he has extracted thousands of brain tumors, this was only the second case of teratoma he came across in his entire career.
If this isn’t a medical miracle, I don’t know what is! Luckily, Yamini maintained a sense of humor about it, referring to the teratoma as her “evil twin sister” who had been “torturing me for the past 26 years.”
Source: Little Things