Dec 12th, 2018: A Red Thing

[xoxoxoBruce]

What the hell is that? A piece of plant root? Something from the ocean like coral? Maybe some sort of deep sea creature.
Or could it have come from outer space?



Nope, it’s a clot, a blood clot, coughed up by a living breathing human who survived.

It’s a completely intact, six-inch-wide clot of human blood in the exact shape of the right bronchial tree, one of the two key tubular networks that ferry air to and from the lungs. And it was coughed up in one piece.

The clot is beautiful, and it’s also kind of gross. The tweet received a slew of replies from those frightened that the photo showed an actual coughed-up lung, which is about as likely to happen as your brain falling out of your butt. But even the doctors who treated the 36-year-old man who produced the clot aren’t entirely sure how it could have emerged without breaking.

36 year old admitted for an aggressive end-stage heart failure? Oh, CA, nevermind.

In Wieselthaler’s case, blood eventually broke out of his patient’s pulmonary network into the lower right lung, heading directly for the bronchial tree. After days of coughing up much smaller clots, Wieselthaler’s patient bore down on a longer, deeper cough and, relieved, spit out a large, oddly shaped clot, folded in on itself. Once Wieselthaler and his team carefully unfurled the bundle and laid it out, they found that the architecture of the airways had been retained so perfectly that they were able to identify it as the right bronchial tree based solely on the number of branches and their alignment.
“We were astonished,” Wieselthaler says. “It’s a curiosity you can’t imagine—I mean, this is very, very, very rare.”

Don't know if that's good or bad?

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