Tree Grows in Man’s Lung

Remember when we were kids and we thought that if we swallowed seeds then a plant would grow inside of us?  Then we got older and laughed at ourselves for frantically spitting out the seeds of everything we ate.  That couldn’t really happen!

Artyom Sidorkin may beg to differ.  The 28 year old Russian man went to the hospital complaining that he had been having intense pain in his chest and was coughing up blood.  Doctors performed an X-Ray on Sidorkin and discovered what they thought was a tumor in his lung.  They performed surgery and were incredibly surprised to find that it wasn’t a tumor, but a small, 5cm. fir tree growing from Sidorkin’s lung.  Doctors removed the tree and are keeping it for research.  The pain and blood were caused from the needles poking into the lung’s capillaries.

Doctors are baffled and amazed at this, and assume Sidorkin must have inhaled the bud of a fir tree, which somehow found his lung a safe place to grow.  Part of me wonders if this is a prank, like when they thought they found Big Foot last year.  Can a tree even grow without sunlight?  I did find this on multiple reputable news sources, so apparently everyone believes it for now.  I’m curious to see how it plays out.  In any case, I’m pretty confident that I will spend the rest of the spring with a surgical mask tightly in place over my mouth…

Click Read More to see the photo of the tree on Sidorkin’s lung.  (Warning: Although interesting, it’s pretty graphic.  Don’t look at this if you plan on eating for the rest of the day.)

UPDATE: Here’s a video of a news story that ran about the tree.

[Thanks to Andrew for the video!]