it grows within you

[UPDATE: If you've read the comments to this post, you've seen that this is likely a hoax. I'm beginning to incline toward that view myself.]

One of the greatest glories of the human condition is pregnancy. Granted, it doesn't feel all that glorious if you're a woman, what with all the bloat and vomiting and weird dietary urges. But gestation is still a marvel: a little life is growing within you, and the moment of birth is, as every parent I know attests, like stepping into a whole new realm of existence.

Perhaps as a result of our evolutionary wiring, we have a completely different view of anything other than a human being growing inside us. Whether it's a tapeworm, or a cancer, or hookworms, or an invasion of ascaris (picture not for the easily grossed-out, but this was an internet classic years ago, so you've probably seen it), we are wired to view such things as a horrifying violation.

The horror begins early. Many children worry about what might happen after they've eaten watermelon seeds: "Will I start growing a watermelon plant inside me?" Most parents respond with a laugh and a "No, of course not, dear." But this isn't to say that you can't grow plants inside your body, as my brother David demonstrated when he sent me a link that led to the following picture:

What you're looking at is a tiny fir tree extracted from a Russian man's lung. Here's what the article says:

A Russian man who had been feeling chest pain and coughing up blood got some stunning news from his doctors -- his symptoms were caused by a tiny fir tree growing in his lungs, Mosnews.com reports.

Doctors spotted a tumor on an X-ray and had expected to find a cancerous tumor when they conducted a biopsy on Artyom Sidorkin, 28, earlier this month. Instead, they found green needles embedded in the tissue.

"I blinked three times, and thought I was seeing things. Then I called the assistant to have a look," said Vladimir Kamashev, a doctor at the Udmurtian Cancer Center in Izhevsk in central Russia.

A 2-inch fir was removed from Sidorkin's lung.

"... I never felt like I had an alien object inside of me," the patient said. Doctors suggested he inhaled a small seed, and it started growing.

As Alan Grant says in the movie version of "Jurassic Park," "Life will find a way." Now that we all live in a post-"Alien" world, I imagine many of us, upon seeing the above photo, are having the same thoughts about chest-bursting aliens. Luckily for us, fir trees grow slowly. Luckily for Mr. Sidorkin, he lives in the era of modern medicine. Imagine if this had occurred two hundred years ago.


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