A teratoma with hair, bone and teeth.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: A Ph.D. student who moved to the U.S. from Hyderabad, India to study computer science underwent brain surgery for the removal of a suspected tumor only to find out that the growth was actually the remnant of her embryonic twin, complete with hair, bone, and teeth.
Yamini Karanam, 26, sought medical help when she started having trouble with her day-to-day comprehension. According to The Washington Post, the once brilliant academic had trouble understanding simple articles. Friends and colleagues would say things to her only for the sentences to get mixed up in her mind.
“Then came the headaches. Slips and misses at work followed,” she wrote on her blog. She even slept for two weeks straight at one point, missing all of her classes during that period of time.
Compounding Karanam’s frustration was that doctors kept contradicting each other regarding the source of her ailment.
“The neurologist would say the neurosurgeon is not being practical in your case,” Karanam told NBC Los Angeles. “And the neurosurgeon would say the neurologist is not being optimistic in your case. And I’m like, could someone be educated about this?”
Karanam’s own research eventually led her to Dr. Hrayr Shahinian at the Skullbase Institute in Los Angeles, who developed a minimally-invasive way of excising tumors that requires a mere half-inch incision to reach deep into a patient’s brain tissue.
Desperate for a cure, her friends set up a fundraising site that garnered $33,147 so she could undergo the surgery, according to the Post.
After procedure was completed, Karanam woke to find the cause of her problems had in fact been a teratoma — her embryonic twin.
“This is my second one, and I’ve probably taken out 7,000 or 8,000 brain tumors,” revealed Shahinian.
Fortunately, Karanam is expected to fully recover within in a month thanks to Shahinian’s procedure, reported the Huffington Post.
Despite laughing and jokingly calling the teratoma her “evil twin,” Karanam said her biggest frustration was that so many other brain surgeons had no idea Shahinian’s technique was available.
“It’s really unfair that people don’t know about it,” she lamented to NBC Los Angeles. “This has to be mainstream. This is the first thing that they should get you. When they know you have a pineal tumor, they should tell you, ‘You know what? There’s a minimally invasive approach in which they won’t kill you, they won’t leave you with a disability. There’s a way in which you can live your life just the way you want to.’”
Shahinian explained to NBC that before he invented his technique, the only option to remove this type of tumor would have been surgery that included removing half of the skull. He attested because the brain is such a sensitive organ, the less it’s disturbed, the better.