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WASHPOST

Something was wrong with Yamini Karanam.
The PhD student had moved from Hyderabad, India, to Indiana in the US to study computer science. But her new life in America was amiss. Once a brilliant student, she now had trouble understanding simple articles. Friends and colleagues would say things to her, only for the sentences to get mixed up and confused in her mind.
Because that's where Karanam's problem lay: deep within her brain.
She went on holiday last autumn but returned even more exhausted than when she left. Karanam slept for two weeks straight, missing school.
"Then came the headaches. Slips and misses at work followed," she wrote. "There were doctors … First, a couple of them and then more and more."
Then came the "revelation": doctors spotted what they thought was probably a cyst on Karanam's pineal gland, a tiny pea-like structure located in the centre of the brain.
Karanam grew sicker and sicker as the tumour grew larger and larger. Reading was impossible. Soon, walking was, too. Only 26, Karanam could barely eat. Pains ran from her head throughout her body.
"But the men of science found no correlation between her suffering and the images," she wrote. "[I] thought they would take [my] problems and own them. But they didn't. There was frustration and anger. Most of all, there was self-doubt. When sanity is in question, the best of us lose ourselves."
Desperate to save Karanam's life, her friends set up a fundraising account online.
"Yamini, was diagnosed with a pineal tumour a few months ago," the website read.
"Most of the doctors seem to think that the location of the tumour poses a lot of risks to the surgery and they think that the tumour could cause irreversible damage to her brain."
Then came the medical procedure that would save Karanam's life and reveal the bizarre malady behind her meltdown.
Karanam found a doctor, Hrayr Shahinian, performing radical "keyhole" brain surgeries at the Skullbase Institute in Los Angeles. Using US$32,437 her friends had raised for her, Karanam flew out to LA and put her life in Shahinian's hands.
Shahinian made a tiny incision in the back of Karanam's head, then strung an endoscope into her skull and through a natural channel in her brain to the site of the tumour. That's when the he made a startling discovery.
Karanam's tumour wasn't just a tumour. It was a teratoma: a clump of bone, hair and teeth. A Frankenstein's monster within Karanam's own mind.
Teratomas have long baffled scientists. Some have speculated that they are basically twins that never develop and are absorbed into the surviving baby's body.
In fact, newborns can have large teratomas attached to them like a conjoined twin.
Earlier this year, doctors in Hong Kong discovered two partially developed fetuses inside a newborn's abdomen.
It's not clear whether Karanam's tumour was really her twin. But it was killing her.
Shahinian successfully removed the tumour, which was not cancerous. He now expects Karanam to make a full recovery.


Surgeon finds embryonic twin in woman's brain

Yamini Karanam  found a doctor, Hrayr Shahinian, performing radical "keyhole" brain surgeries at the Skullbase Institute in Los Angeles. 

Surgeons operating on Karanam discovered the growth, indicated just above the red dot above, was in fact a teratoma - a growth containing bone, hair and teeth.

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World

Student Yamini Karanam's ailment was a mystery, until keyhole operation


Student Yamini Karanam's ailment was a mystery, until keyhole operation.
