Posts tagged ‘wacky’
It may not be the most appetizing reading before a hearty holiday meal, but the New England Journal of Medicine is devoting part of its Thanksgiving issue to a giant hairball — and not the feline kind.
The prestigious journal details the case of a previously healthy 18-year-old woman who consulted a team of gastrointestinal specialists.
She complained of a five-month history of pain and swelling in her abdomen, vomiting after eating and a 40-pound weight loss.
After a scan of the woman’s abdomen showed a large mass, doctors lowered a scope through her esophagus.
It revealed “a large bezoar occluding nearly the entire stomach,” wrote Drs. Ronald M. Levy and Srinadh Komanduri, gastroenterologists at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, Illinois.
For the uninitiated, a bezoar is a hairball.
“On questioning, the patient stated that she had had a habit of eating her hair for many years — a condition called trichophagia,” they wrote.
“It seemed like she’d been doing this for several years,” Levy told CNN.
The woman underwent surgery to remove the mass of black, curly hair, which weighed 10 pounds and measured 15 inches by 7 inches by 7 inches, the doctors said.
Five days later, she was eating normally and was sent home.
A year later, the pain and vomiting were gone, the patient had regained 20 pounds “and reports that she has stopped eating her hair.”
Reached at his home in Chicago, Levy said he had no idea whether the journal’s timing of the publication on Thanksgiving was intentional.
Either way, he said, it would not affect the gastroenterologists’ holiday dinner plans — “We don’t get fazed by much.”
Source - The New England Journal Of Medicine
MINEOLA, N.Y. - The estranged wife of a pastor claims her husband blended his professional and personal finances so thoroughly that his church should be counted as an asset in their divorce.
A judge agreed in a decision published this week to hear arguments on the claim, and he ordered a financial appraisal of the church. Lawyers said it could represent the first time anyone in New York state has tried to treat a religious institution as a marital asset.
The wife argues that her husband of 31 years used his Brooklyn church as a “personal piggy bank,” setting his own income, spending the congregation’s tithes as he pleased and running a catering business from the building, according to the decision by state Supreme Court Judge Arthur M. Diamond. The couple’s names were redacted from the decision.
The wife said $50,000 of the couple’s money went into starting the church, and that the church property is partly hers.
“That church is no different than any other business he might have opened,” said the wife’s lawyer, Robert Pollack.
The pastor maintains he is simply a church employee, and the institution’s funds should not be considered his, according to Diamond’s decision.
“My client can’t own the church,” said the minister’s lawyer, Eleanor Gery.
[Via - AZCentral]
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