Image Source: The BBC.
In my search for bizarre news, I’ve found a maddening amount of articles about weird medical things happening in Britain. So, in solidarity with Frank Turner’s recent back problems, I’ll be writing this big column about strange things happening to British bodies and minds. Just FYI, this will be quite a long article. I couldn’t narrow it down for the life of me.
Scientists grow a little brain.
I’ve mentioned before how scientists have managed to grow a stem-cell burger. Granted, it’s not cost-effective yet, nor does it veen really taste good, but that hasn’t stopped them from growing a miniature brain in a petrie dish.
The British-Austrian team hopes that the 3 mm brain (which has the structure of an immature human brain) could potentially lead to breakthroughs in mental health treatment. However, if you’re looking for an replacement brain, you’re still far away.
The goal right now is to produce a tool that can simultaneeously investigate the working of the brain and test new drugs.Though several people have grown other body parts, nothing on the order of a human brain has been made.
However, team leader Juergen Knoblich does not expect that we will be able to grow brains in labs anytime soon. He said: “Our system is not optimised for generating an entire brain and that is also in no way our goal.” But, though the brain is small, it’s not too differnt from that of a feetus in the womb.Dr Dean Burnett, University of Cardiff lecturer said of the project’s limitations: “Saying you can replicate the workings of the brain with some tissue in a dish in a lab is like inventing the first abacus and saying you can use it to run the latest version of Microsoft Windows; there is a connection there, but we’re a long way from that sort of application yet.”
But Stem cell scientist Dr Zameel Cader, from Oxford University has high hopes: “The structure they have generated is a long way from a real brain and the challenges for creating even a primitive foetal brain remain daunting. Hopes to recreate a real brain therefore remain distant. The proper organisation and blood supply of the brain are not present in this model and are major limitations. However, their model is audacious and the similarities with some of the features of a human brain are really quite astounding.”
Man loses nose at the dentist.
Yep. It’s official; British dentists have officially earned all the bad press they’ve built up over the years. Cyril Osment of Alweston, Dorset, lost his nose to cancer recently, but has been getting by with a prosthetic. Until he lost it at his dentist’s office, that is. The nose was held on by magnets that seemed to have been failing; Quoth Cyril: “It was beginning to fall of regularly. I think the magnets were failing. The day before I lost it, it fell off three times while I was gardening.” Finally, when he got back home, he looked in the mirror to find it was gone. The dental staff failed to find it, and now he’s appealing to anyone who can find it. Hopefully, someone has found it, and the nose will not have come to life and made a big career for itself, like the one in Gogol’s story. He added: “I hope the hospital will give me another one.” If you find a nose in Devon, please try and find him.
Scot diagnosed with Chronic Lateness.
Brit has world’s longest tongue… and it keeps growing!
You’d be forgiven for thinking that Gene Simmons of Kiss has the world’s longest tongue, but, alas, he doesn’t. Stephen Taylor of Coventry first claimed the world record for the world’s longest tongue in 2009. It was 9.5 cm long. Four years later, he had it remeasured: It’s now 9.8 cm from the middle of the top lip to the tip of the tongue. Quoth Stephen: “It keeps growing, probably because of all the TV shows I’ve been on where I’ve been sticking it out.”
Man hypnotises himself before surgery… without anesthesia!
As you may have noticed, the page image for this article comes from Little Britain. It’s a funny show, except when it’s not, and the scenes where Matt Lucas plays hypnotist Kenny Craig, it’s pretty funny. And now, a trained hypnotherapist has managed to successfully hypnotise himself before undergoing under the knife without anesthesia a total of six times. And during his most recent operation, he even asked a doctor how it was going.
Quoth Dr. Dominic Nielsen, who performed the surgery: “He did amazingly well with the whole thing. To be honest, it was just like doing any other operation. Alex went through the process, which took a very short period of time, and he told us he was ready to go ahead. It was then a case of getting on and doing the operation. It sort of went out of my mind that he was awake and able to correspond… It was strange, He just seemed to put himself into a trance and just lay there and didn’t have any problems at all.”
A peoper anesthesiologist was on stand-by in case the hypnosis failed. But, since Lenkei has been using self-hypnosis for half a century, thee doctors allowed him to do it his way.Quoth Lenkei: “I’m not averse to anaesthetic – it’s just that my pain control is a hell of a lot better than the medical profession’s and I heal a lot quicker because my body doesn’t have to get rid of all the chemicals. The brain is a very sophisticated computer and if your press the right buttons it will do amazing things – if you press the right buttons it will switch certain things off.”
Mr Lenkei is willing to have a researcher study him should he ever need another operation.
Pregnancy: tummy ache babies and strange cravings.
Something that will never cease to amaze me is how a woman can go through several months of pregnancy (at least one trimester) and not know she’s pregnant, but it still happens. Case in point: Amanda Ross, 41, of Bristol insisted that she had no symptoms of pregnancy before she found out she was well into her third trimester. She said: “I had the munchies, but nothing, no cravings for anything in particular. I did not feel any movement. I put on a little bit of weight but nothing that was like a baby bump.” But, one day, she went to a GP for stomach trouble, and was told she could be pregnant. Then, she had a scan with a midwife who confirmed it. 15 hours later, her daughter Chloe was born ( 4 lb, 9 oz.). I can’t help but think of the scene from Addams Family Values where Morticia tells Gomez “I’m going to have a baby… right now.”
Ross wanted to be a mother, but accepted that she would most likely never become a mother when she reached 40. She added: “I have bonded (with Chloe) very well, considering that we did not have much time to prepare. We were sat at home just chatting about what to do with the next couple of weeks and then obviously she was born by emergency Caesarean 15 hours later and then she was in the neonatal intensive care unit for a day and a half.”
Her boyfriend Paul Dean, a father of two and grandfather of two more said: “It is fantastic, but it is still a shock. It has not sunk in at all,” he said.
However, on another note, a mum from Wolverhampton recently told The Sun about her own weird pregnancy cravings. She’s given birth to two healthy children, Lucian, 4, and Lola, 7 months. All this despite eating hundreds of sandwiches made of sand and sponges. She told the Sun: “I thought it was just a one-off craving while I was carrying Lucian. But when I fell pregnant with Lola it all started up again… I kept getting this weird taste in my mouth. I was craving something, then I saw the sand in [a parrot’s] cage and knew what it was.” Then she took a bath and started to eye her sponges: “I’d dip them in play sand or make sandwiches out of them — with a sand filling.” Amazingly, her two children grew up healthy, and when she gave birth, she kicked the habit.
Paging Dr. Sacks… Three Brits with mental losses.
I have long had an interest in the working of the human mind, but my interest in and knowledge of the working of the human mind is matched only by my lack of therapeutic instinct. So, I’m not a psychologist. But here are three cases involving mental blocks: one who can’t remember anything, one who can’t feel sadness, and one who can’t feel fear.
Two years ago, 16-year old Rosie Paley of Brierley Hill, Birmingham, had a fit after contracting encephalitis. when she came to, she couldn’t remember anything, even her own family. Quoth Rosie: “I can’t remember anything from before I was ill. I’ve lost all my childhood friends as I can’t recognise them. When I first came round, mum brought my brothers to see me. I had no idea who they were and I panicked.”
Rosie attempts to rebuild her past by looking at a board of photos she’s made. She said of them : “When I look at the photographs I see how happy I was, but it just draws a blank in my head. I wish I had the memories to go with the pictures. However, life is now about making new memories.”
On another note, Malcolm Hyatt of Staffordshire had a stroke in 2004. He lost feeling in his left side, but he also lost the ability to feel sad. Needless to say, he took it very well: “I am never depressed. I would rather be happy all the time than the other way round. Now I barely even notice that I don’t feel sadness. It’s only other people that give me funny looks. There must be a part of the brain that remembers jokes. I love telling them. I always have, but now I want other people to feel happy too. … The day before the stroke I’d driven the length of the M1. Later, I went downstairs and made toast and coffee – but by the time I got upstairs I’d spilt half the coffee and the butter was an inch thick. The doctors didn’t know if I was going to make it through the night – they told Kath to prepare for the worst. But I was still hanging around days later. I say thank you every morning I wake up.”
Quoth his wife Kath: “He’s very childish now. It’s infectious. When Malcolm starts laughing everyone in the room does. If he’s in hysterics, everyone else is too. It has affected his short term memory. He can remember things he did 20 years ago but cannot remember the last week. Malcolm just says what he thinks, he sometimes doesn’t understand that it’s rude. If someone has an ugly dog, he’ll tell them. It’s worst when we go to a funeral. He’ll still be smiling and telling jokes while everyone else is completely sombre. The doctors told me that I shouldn’t apologise for him but sometimes I have to explain his situation.”
On a similar note, Jordy Cernik of Jarrow fears nothing. What made him like this? Well, it’s a long story, but here goes. He developed Cushing syndrome (which affects 1 in 50,000 people), a glandular problem that led to him gaining 80 lbs in 3 years, and had to have surgery to remove the gland that produces adrenaline. Adrenaline is the hormone that makes us feel scared. Now, he feels no fear.
Quoth Jordy: “I would never have had the guts to do any of this, but now nothing fazes me. I’m up for anything – I’m even thinking about doing a wing-walk on a plane too. I nearly did a bungee jump a few years ago, but I just couldn’t do it. Now I just take whatever is thrown at me and if a challenge helps me raise money for charity, the more daring the better.”
In just four months, he jumped from a parachute, zip-wired from the top of Tyne Bridge, and will complete the Bupa Great North Run. The run is a half-marathon run from Newcastle to South Shields. Cushing’s syndrome, however, left him with arthritis and back problems. The treatment, however, has led to him lacking one of the body’s natural painkillers. Quoth Jody: “I’m always in pain. I’ve just had to learn to zone it out day-to-day and I’m going to have to do that even more when I’m on the run.”
Jordy continues: “The doctors didn’t tell me this could be one of the side-effects of the operation,” says Jordy. “But then the condition is so rare I don’t think they know everything about Cushing’s yet. Doing the skydive was the ultimate test. I thought that if I was ever going to get scared again then that would be the moment. But as we took off in the plane I felt nothing, and when I edged towards the door to jump I felt nothing, and even when I leapt out and pulled my parachute, I didn’t feel scared at all. It can be quite frustrating as well though. The first time I realised I had changed was when I went on the rides at a theme park with my kids and I just didn’t feel a thing. I just sat there, bored.”
Talking about his illness, he said: “I went through years of hell and I can only describe it as living in someone else’s body. I developed this big round moon face and really quite large man boobs, which was so embarrassing. But there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I could go to the gym six days a week and still couldn’t lose any of the weight. One of the worst things was that people would stare. Sometimes they’d take the mickey – often to try and make me feel better, by making light of things – but it would almost always hurt my feelings. And my career as a presenter suffered. I tried to play up to the character of being a big, jolly chap but I always felt I was too fat for TV, which is what I would have liked to do a lot more of. I had other really difficult symptoms which included profuse sweating which meant I couldn’t even hold my kids without wrapping them in towels first. Anyone who has children knows how hard that is, not to be able to do normal things. I often used to be in tears. Another symptom was extreme grumpiness, so I would find myself suddenly getting really angry and just exploding at them, plus I was always too exhausted to play with them. It was terrible.”
After 15 years of Hell, the Cushing’s is in remission and Jordy has lost four stone, but he still has to take 30 pills a day, a cocktail of painkillers and hormones, plus drugs to slow the corrosion of his bones. And yet, he still is perfectly willing to run a half-marathon for charity. The run will be live on BBC1 on 15 September starting 9:30 AM.
Flesh-eating virus stymied by obese victim’s sheer amount of fat.
There’s a growing obesity epidemic around the world, and it leads to new health crises. But, for one 39-year old from Kent, obesity could have saved his life. After surgery, a long-dormant dose of the nectorising fasciitis came back to life in Russell Kimble. Within hours, it was eating away flesh at the rate of 3 cm/hr. But, fortunately, the bug had far too much to work with, and the doctors were able to literally remove the threat by removing 14 lb of infected tissue.
Quoth Kimble: “I had a lot of weight to lose but being a big chap probably saved my life, along with all the work of the doctors and nurses. Surgeons could afford to cut away a lot of my skin and flesh, which was fortunate as it was spreading fast. It was moving from my groin round to my lower back at quite a rate. Surgeons would remove a load of skin and flesh, then take me up to intensive care to assess how I was going. Then I would go back down again and they would remove more.”
After seven weeks in the hospital, he lost not only the flesh-eating virus, but also 70 lbs, for good measure. He even missed his own wedding, but it will happen in in October. Quoth Kimble: “I don’t think the suit I had fitted then is going to fit anymore.” PHEW! Thankfully, I hope my next article will be shorter.