Too Strange to be True? Tree Found Growing in Man’s Lung

Remember being told when you were a kid that if you swallowed any of the seeds inside an apple, the fruit would start growing in your stomach? And then learning later that it was all a joke? Well…turns out that might not be so far from impossible. The Russian publication Mosnews.com is reporting that a 28-year-old patient was found to have a five-centimeter fir tree in his lung.

Doctors were performing a biopsy on the patient, Artyom Sidorkin, after he’d complained of intense chest pain and was coughing up blood. They suspected cancer, but instead of finding a tumor when they cut the lung tissue, they reportedly found green needles. They continued, in alleged disbelief, to remove an entire branch from inside Sidorkin’s body.

The medical team believes that the blood Sidorkin had been coughing up was a result of the needles poking the capillaries, and that the branch grew inside his body after he swallowed a small bud—since clearly, the branch was not swallowed whole.

Hoax? Or truth? We’ll keep you updated as the story, er, blooms.