Listening to Tucker and Taz on the FM96 morning show the other day, they yakked about a photo on their webpage of a wee tree that supposedly grew in a Russian man’s lung.
I am the original skeptic. A tree? Really? Doesn’t a tree need sunlight for growth and wouldn’t a lung be, well, dark? But there it was, a small fir tree in the goopy mess of lung tissue and the story told by doctors went like this: A Russian man complains of chest pains and coughs up blood. Doctors suspect a heart attack but an Xray turns up a little fir tree growing in his lung. They assume he aspirated a bud which germinated and grew a seedling in the moist conditions. They say the tree was too big for him to have simply swallowed. The little tree in the photo looked quite healthy and green, which, again, remembering high school science classes, seemed to me to require beams of sunlight. But my brain went with it!
Now – with a nod to Paul Harvey – the rest of the story.
Several experts from outside of Russia say it’s just not possible. My gut reaction to the sunlight theory is correct. The tree is too healthy to have been grown in a cavernous organ. Also, they say, the story was released by Russian media on what was their April Fool’s day! Well, duh! If I had known that from the start that would have explained the whole thing!
I even feel silly now admitting that I thought the lung tree could be real. But I did. They got me. I even told a few people to look it up. (blush) So it appears that someone in Russia dreamed up this little hoax and it spread around the world. It’s a harmless virus, if you will. And it even suckered in the original sceptic: me!