My girlfriend is a urologist, and one of her young female patients experienced severe pain when she had to pee.
A cystoscopy revealed that there was a large polyp with a high degree of calcification in her urinary bladder, and it was almost certainly cancerous. So an operation was planned right away to remove the tumor from the patient’s bladder.
When the patient was opened up though, something entirely different than was expected was found in her bladder: the tumor was not a tumor at all, but a foreign object.
And the unidentified not-so flying object actually turned out to be an IUD — an intra-uterine contraceptive device — and this particular IUD had migrated from the womb to the bladder, meaning that it had somehow penetrated through both the uterine wall and bladder wall before it got stuck in the patient’s bladder.
There, it calcified and became a tumor look-alike.
Our immunity system hates foreign objects (such as piercings and the like), and through a process called “migration,” it tries to remove such objects from the body, but this was one of the rarest and most extreme examples of this very mechanism ever.
This particular case had a silver lining though —
The patient was cancer-free.
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