Local man grows garden: INSIDE his body
Remember when you were little and your mom told you that if you
swallowed too many watermelon seeds a watermelon would start growing in
your stomach? And that if you kept chowing down your matchbox cars tiny
little pit crews would start drag racing in your colon? Well, maybe that
last one was just us. Anyway, one Bedford man probably should have heeded his mother's warnings.
75-year-old Ron Sveden,
a retired teacher suffering from emphysema, was justifiably alarmed
when he discovered a strange lump in his throat. The lump was growing at
a fairly unsettling pace, and was beginning to further impair his
breathing. Believing it to be a tumor, stemming, perhaps, from his
existing condition, he went straight to the hospital to get the strange
growth checked out.
Two weeks of tests later (and a collapsed lung) the previously stymied doctors finally came up with a diagnosis: Sveden
had a plant growing in his lungs. A pea plant to be exact. The pesky
plant was winding its way up and around his left lung as it grew. It
sounds like an episode of the Twilight Zone (or at least some scary
real-life medical horror show in the vein of "Monsters Inside Me")
but apparently this sort of thing is not that uncommon. The docs
determined that an errant pea must have gone down the wrong pipe,
lodging itself in his lung where it soon thrived in the warm, moist
environment. Gross! Luckily, they were able to remove the fledgling
plant from Sveden with no complications, though it's safe to say no delicious pot pies will ever spawn from this particular pea plant.
Let this be a lesson to us all. Just say no to pop rocks and cola. Mikey should have.