Friday, June 16, 2006

Cactus Woman

From one of the best websites on the planet, Warren Ellis, comes a true story. I hope anyway because its so f*cking hilarious.


In Yerevan in the former Soviet republic of Armenia, 18-year-old girl Narine Aivasyan shocked doctors with her unusual disease. The girl complained about an abscess on her wrist that had been hurting her for a long period already. When doctors opened the bandage on Narine`s hand they saw two very thin thorns sticking out of the hand. The girl was fond of pot plants and devoted much time to looking after her plants. Once, Narine pricked herself on a cactus while watering plants. Some thorns got stuck in her wrist. The parents immediately disinfected the wound but it still festered and even expanded. Narine was reluctant to visit a doctor. She had to go to a hospital in a month when a point of a thorn emerged on the skin right on the place of the red wound. Doctors easily removed the strange object, but more thorns turned up on the same spot soon.
Head of the immunology and virology laboratory at the Armenia research center Tigran Davtyan says the world medicine has never known before that herbal cells may settle down and parasitize on the organism of a human or an animal. Deeper study of the thorns removed out of the girl`s wrist confirmed their vegetative origin. It turned out that the thorns belonged to a cactus that many people had at home.
The only way to save the girl was to perform an operation to remove the fistula to stop the cactus from parasitizing all about the organism. When researchers studied the bigger thorns they arrived at a conclusion that they were no longer of vegetative origin. As a result of mutation, the patient got new unknown cells, some sort of a hybrid of a human and a plant. In other words, the young girl was turning into a cactus!

The Adventures of Cactus Girl

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