The year 2020 was the year of so many, both literally and figuratively. Nowhere is that more clear than in this year's bizarre medical incidents that made the headlines. Here are three of some of the strange medical cases for this year as listed down by LiveScience.
BIRMINGHAM, UNITED KINGDOM - JUNE 14: Surgeons at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham conduct an operation on June 14, 2006, Birmingham, England. Senior managers of the NHS have said that the organisation needs to become more open in the future.
Continuous Coronavirus
Since they develop the infection, people with COVID-19 remain normally infected for around eight days. But for a record 70 days, a woman in Washington State shed infectious virus particles, indicating she was contagious the whole time. However, according to a case study released on November 4 in the journal Cell, she never displayed signs of the disease.
The 71-year-old woman had leukemia. Hence, her immune system was compromised and the latest coronavirus identified as SARS-CoV-2 was less capable of clearing her body.
The woman was contaminated in late February during the first recorded COVID-19 epidemic in the world, which occurred at the recovery clinic of the Life Care Center in Kirkland, Washington. During a 15-week duration, the woman was screened more than a dozen times for COVID-19. The infection was observed for 105 days in her upper respiratory tract, and contagious virus particles were detected for at least 70 days, suggesting they were able to transmit the disease.
Eventually, the woman was able to get rid of the infection, but doctors don't know how it happened. The results indicate that immunocompromised COVID-19 patients could be infectious for much longer than normal amounts of time.
Green pea? More like green pee!
It can be frightening making your pee turn green. But green urine may be an unusual side effect of certain drugs, as a guy in Chicago figured out.
Since he was discovered to have elevated amounts of carbon dioxide in his blood, a disease that may be life-threatening, the 62-year-old man was hospitalized. According to a paper on the occasion, reported Dec. 2 in The New England Journal of Medicine, the man was put on a ventilator and offered a general anaesthetic named propofol. The man's urine, which had been stored in a catheter bag, turned green five days later.
Although green urine can be attributed to a variety of causes, the perpetrator was propofol in this situation. This drug is commonly used for general anesthesia, but can render a person's urine green in unusual circumstances.
Fortunately, if the drug is discontinued, this discoloration is benign and goes down. Indeed, after he was taken off propofol, the man's urine returned to a natural color, the study stated.
Pierced heart
The chest pain of a teen had a shocking source with a sewing pin in his heart.
Since feeling a sudden pain in his chest that radiated to his back, the 17-year-old went to the emergency department, according to a case study released July 29 in The Journal of Emergency Medicine. The study stated that a CT scan of his chest revealed there was a "linear metallic foreign" item embedded in his heart.
The item turned out to be a sewing pin 1.4-inch (3.5 centimeters) that was extracted by doctors during open-heart surgery.
Initially, the boy assured the physicians that he hadn't swallowed any foreign objects or suffered physical chest injuries. But he admitted in a later interview that he tailors his clothing and keeps sewing pins in his mouth often. Even, he claimed he was not conscious of a sewing pin being swallowed.
Foreign bodies in the heart, especially in children and teenagers, are uncommon. Fortunately, as far as the writers are conscious, the teen healed after his operation and had no problems, they added.
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