A woman who underwent tumour removal surgery to remove was told when she woke up that she was carrying inside her brain her embryonic twin with “bone, hair and teeth”.
Yamini Karanam, a 26-year-old PhD student from Indiana, began experiencing difficulties with reading and basic comprehension last September.
"Problems with reading comprehension, listening comprehension. If a couple people were talking in a room, I wouldn't understand what was happening," Karanam told NBC4.
After many discussions with doctors who had contradicting opinions on the cause of the problem, Karanam underwent keyhole surgery.
Doctors made a half-inch incision into Karanam's brain that enabled an endoscope to reach and carefully chisel away at the 'tumour'.
Karanam joked about how her ‘evil twin sister who's been torturing me for the past 26 years’ after her surgeon, Dr. Hrayr Shahinian, explained teratoma when she woke after surgery.
"This is my second one, and I've probably taken out 7,000 or 8,000 brain tumors,” Dr Shahinian with the Skullbase Institute in Los Angeles said.
Shahinian said before he invented his keyhole technique, the only option to remove this type of tumour would have been removing half of the skull.
Unlike traditional brain surgery where you open the skull and use metal retractors and you bring a microscope to see in the depths of the brain, what we're doing is keyhole surgery," he said, adding that a half-inch incision into the brain allows for an endoscope to reach in and slowly and very delicately chisel away at the tumour.
Teratomas, extremely rare in humans, are the result of abnormal development of pluripotent cells and are congenital in the cases of being of embryonic origin. Fetus in fetu and fetiform teratoma involve one or more components resembling a malformed fetus.
