Well, as I’ve mentioned before, the story about the Russian who supposedly has a pine tree growing in his lung I posted in April last year has been by far the most popular on this blog. Today, though, I started getting a lot of hits again. I think this new news story is why.
This one is from Massachusetts and appears to have medical backing – perhaps I was wrong to be sceptical of the Russian guy who’d chosen a pine tree for his shrubbery!
Doctors suspect he had eaten a pea at some point in the last couple of months and it went down the wrong way, and then began to grow.
Mind you, the guy in the news report makes it clear his seed had sprouted about half an inch – you could have built a tree house in the Russian one.
The news story (which contains a video interview with Ron Sveden, the patient involved) doesn’t show the seed – again, unlike the Russians, who appeared to have a film crew in the operating theatre judging from some of the photos.
Mr Sveden is making a recovery, which is obviously the most important thing.
EDIT 1/6/2011: A-ha! A reader from New York tells me that this was the subject of an episode of Grey’s Anatomy (Season 7, Episode 21), which was recently shown in the US. The same episode is on Sky TV tonight, so it’ll be interesting to see if it triggers many more UK hits.