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Monday, April 13, 2009

Green Not Cool, Trees. NOT COOL AT ALL.

Posted by Erik Henriksen on Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 6:14 PM

7a9b/1239670707-treelung.jpg

A five-centimeter fir tree has been found in the lung of a man who complained he had a strong pain in his chest and was coughing blood.

The 28-year-old patient, Artyom Sidorkin, came to a hospital in the city of Izhevsk in Central Russia last week, Komsomolskaya Pravda daily reports.

Doctors x-rayed his chest and found a tumor in one of the lungs. Suspecting cancer, they made a decision to perform biopsy, but when they cut the tissue, they were amazed to see green needles in the cut.

So the best guess is that this dude "inhaled a small bud, which then started to grow inside his body." Which is just fucking great. As if I needed any-fucking-thing else to worry about.

And yes, this SCIENCE FACT gives horrifying, IRREFUTABLE credence to this beloved children's tale, which totally happened to my friend Alex's cousin's babysitter's grandma, and which gave me no shortage of cold-sweat nightmares as a child.

Mosnews, via io9.

 

Comments (8) RSS

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1
Man, this is like the last fifteen minutes of every episode of House combined and then made slightly more terrible.
Posted by atomic on April 13, 2009 at 6:15 PM · Report
2
Don't trees need like, light, in order to stimulate needle production? I don't have trouble believing that you could get something to sprout in your lungs, (nice moist place after all,) but to get a tree to start to put on needles and stuff, it would have had to break the surface of the ground, notice the light, and then it would put on needles to get the photosynthesis going. No light = no needles, it will still think it is underground and it would grow stem instead.

And since it is pretty dang dark in the lungs, I'm going have to call this fake.
Posted by Matthew D on April 13, 2009 at 6:16 PM · Report
3
I am going to go home, watch Little Otik, and cry.
Posted by ezra on April 13, 2009 at 6:36 PM · Report
4
ezra, can we just act like the movie Little Otik never happened?
Posted by Graham on April 13, 2009 at 7:26 PM · Report
5
Why would they remove so much tissue? And why does lung tissue look like a small animal's intestines?
Posted by pdxuser on April 13, 2009 at 8:12 PM · Report
6
Um, "inhaled a small bud?!" Really? Bad news, dude.
Posted by a.O on April 13, 2009 at 9:41 PM · Report
7
I worked for the Navy for a summer and one of their propaganda/safety brochures detailed what would happen if you didn't wear safety goggles... a fucking tree seedling would embed itself in your EYE and would grow into a little tree. It came with a ghastly picture. Stupid Navy.
Posted by Courtney Ferguson on April 14, 2009 at 8:55 AM · Report
8
Arugula! It's a ve-ge-ta-ble.
Posted by Will Radik on April 14, 2009 at 10:35 AM · Report

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