- Today I'm looking at some of the most
unique medical conditions and surgeries caught on camera. Some of these, I've never even heard of. They're so rare. Also, huge thanks to ShipStation
for sponsoring this video. Let's get started. - [Narrator] Disa is a
small agricultural town in Northwest India. 13-Year-old Shrea lives here,
with her extended family. But 18 months ago, Shrea found herself at the center of a medical mystery. - [Interpreter] One evening she sat here and complained her ear was hurting. When I checked, I found an ant. - When I look inside my patient's ears using an otoscope, I find unique things. A lot of times, it's pieces
of cotton from using Q-Tips which I tell them not to
put deep inside their ears. But there have been insect parts or even insects that I've
seen inside people's ears, so that's not totally unusual. - [Narrator] Shrea had been sleeping on the floor and in the
summer, ants are common. - [Interpreter] After that, more and more ants were appearing. It was painful and itchy. - Not only is it painful and itchy, but you're gonna hear the
ants moving around in there. It can drive a person mad. - [Interpreter] MRI
and CT scans were taken as Dr. Talsania searched for somewhere within the soft tissue or bone around Shrea's ear where
an ant may have laid eggs. - Like in the eustachian tube? - [Narrator] But incredibly, the scans showed nothing unusual. Then, after nearly eight months, just as suddenly as they first
appeared, the ants vanished. In that time, about 1,000
ants had been removed from Shrea's ear.
- Wow. - [Interpreter] I don't know
why they aren't coming anymore. When I read all the medical
science books, no one knows why and how the ants entered
her ears in the first place. - There must be some kind of hygiene issue where the
ants were able to enter the ear and they sat in some sort of crevice behind a part of the ear and
were able to lay some eggs. And when those eggs were
hatching, the ants were coming up. - [Narrator] The Da Silva family
never misses an opportunity to get together. They're excellent musicians and dancers, but, it's something in their genes that truly sets them apart. - Oh, polydactyly. - [Narrator] 14 Members
of the Da Silva family, have six fingers on each hand
and six toes on each foot. - They must have some kind of
gene that encodes for this. - [Interpreter] Anna
Carolina, she has six. Jao, my son, has six. - Wow. - [Narrator] Today the family's
celebrating the arrival of a baby boy. His father, Alessandro, has six fingers. - It's gotta be some kind of dominant gene because it's being passed onto it seems, like every
member of the family. So it's some kind of
autosomal dominant gene. - [Narrator] So like his older
brother, he had a 50% chance of inheriting the six finger gene. - [Doctor] Let's count them. One, two, three, four, five and six. - [Interpreter] My brother
is going to have six fingers. - Gotta love the ultrasound probe. - [Narrator] The Da Silva
family's hands are all fine and functional, and they find
six fingers can be an asset. - [Interpreter] The coolest thing about having six fingers is being able to hold a lot of things at once. - Yeah, I can't imagine that being a major detriment
in any way, really. Maybe for things designed for people with five fingers, like gloves, it might be complicated
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back to these conditions. - [Narrator] 17-Year-old Workitu, lives in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She looks like a typical teenager, but has spent much of her life hiding an unusually
rare physical condition. Workitu was born with an extra set of arms and legs, limbs from a parasitic twin that died in her mother's womb. - Okay, so when they say parasitic twin, the reason they say it that way, it sounds like there's some kind of illness going on, but what's in reality has happened is, you had an underdeveloped or non-fully-developed twin
happen inside your body or on the outside of your body
that didn't have any organs and essentially, is
surviving off of the energy and lifeblood off the single body. - [Narrator] Workitu grew up
thinking her body was normal, although her parents
insisted she cover herself with long dresses. Workitu was 11-years-old
when she found out that her body was different
during a school sports class. - That's gotta be difficult
if you're the only one in your class experiencing
something like this, you're gonna feel like an outlier and you're gonna need support from your friends and family, and maybe even medical professionals. - [Narrator] The Cure Hospital in Addis Ababa is Ethiopia's
leading children's hospital. It's specializes in
treating common deformities like cleft palate. But doctors there, had never taken on a case as complex as Workitu's. - I mean, in many cases
this is a surgical procedure that can be done, and would probably help the
individual significantly, if not for anything, the musculoskeletal support. Remember, carrying excess weight of limbs on your body is not comfortable for the biomechanics of
walking, let alone standing. - [Narrator] After three weeks of tests, the doctors decided they could operate. The limbs of the parasitic
twin would be amputated. Surgery of this kind had never
been attempted in Ethiopia. - The only option that you have for treating this problem is surgery. - Yeah, it's surgery with an amputation and then some kind of
embolization of the arteries to prevent the person from bleeding out. - So we have to do as many
imaging studies as we can to be able to document in our minds, exactly what the anatomy is as close as possible. - That's why a lot of times when patients request a CT
scan, an MRI, we have to agree that the reason we're doing these scans is for the purpose of getting surgery. Because in many instances, getting an MRI to get a diagnosis doesn't help you in any way other than making
a diagnosis for the surgeon. - [Surgeon] We started first
with the rudimentary arms because we thought that would be easier and actually, that came off as easy as it possibly could have. Then we moved down to the lower part which is where the pelvis was where we were going to remove her legs. And this was a little
bit more challenging. - I can imagine this being challenging 'cause you gotta navigate the host or patient's organs
and circulatory system. Remember, her body has been
feeding these limbs, blood rich in oxygen so that there
is these extra arteries that need to be severed. But you also need to make sure
you're not severing arteries that could be also,
contributing to her health. And sometimes, with patients that have what they're referring to as a parasitic twin, they can have one of these fully inside their body and sometimes, we can't even know if this is what's known as a teratoma, which is a type of tumor
that has all different types of cell lines in it, hair,
fingernails, bones, et cetera. Or is it truly a parasitic twin? - [Interpreter] I used to work in a plastic-packaging factory, operating an extruder machine. - [Narrator] An extruder machine grinds and melts plastic materials to create tubing,
plastic sheets and films. - [Interpreter] I was
assisting the machine operator. My hand was dragged into the cylinder. I held my arm and screamed. I could feel the tip of
my fingers inside it. It was an agonizing moment. - [Surgeon's Interpreter]
The night shift called me and explained that they had a case where they were likely to amputate. - So in many instances when you have a hand injury,
especially a crush injury, unless you have a super
sub-specialized hand surgeon, you will just go forward
with the amputation. Even in our ERs here in the
Northeast, if you have a patient with a a bone injury of the hand, you generally don't call
the general orthopedist. You call a hand surgeon. - [Narrator] Dr. Brandao planned to surgically insert Carlos'
left hand inside his abdomen to allow his body to regrow
torn flesh and nerve tendons. - [Surgeon's Interpreter]
We made an incision on the side of his abdomen. This created a space in between the skin and muscle to tuck his
hand where it would connect with live tissues, creating
a neovascularization. - We have seen this happen
with burn patients before. I haven't seen this happen with a trauma situation like this. - [Narrator] For six weeks,
Carlos endured the physical and mental anguish of
having the affixed hand. - I just don't understand the purpose of this, outside of growing the skin because if the bones are broken and crushed, what is the goal here? - [Surgeon's Interpreter] The abdomen fat and skin got attached to his hand and created vascular links. Here we can see the x-ray of
Carlos's open and closed hands. We noticed the mobility
of the remaining fingers. Now the thumb, which is almost in its entirety, has reasonable movement. - [Carlos' Interpreter] Today, I can feel all fingers separately. It's a bit hard to move them
because they're all joined, but I can move them one at a time. But I have faith that it
will look like a normal hand in the future. - I mean, I'm sure that there's other hand
specialist surgeons that could probably change at least, the appearance of this hand and to make it more functional. In instances like this by the way, you don't just also do
surgery, you also work with not just a physical therapist, but an occupational
therapist 'cause you need to make use of the hand. And occupational therapy focuses on those fine motor movements
like buttoning a shirt. - [Narrator] Bahia, Brazil. In 2009, a pair of healthy
twin brothers were born here, Atur and Artur, but in
a one in 200,000 chance, they were conjoined at the waist. - So conjoined twins can happen in different parts of the body. You can be joined in the lower portion of the spine, the longer
portion of the spine, the head, even the upper body. We used to use the term "Siamese twins," because of case that occurred in Siam, which is now Thailand, by the way. We've moved away from that and are now calling them conjoined twins because they're literally attached, and in most cases, surgical
separation is an option. This can get quite complicated
in certain instances because some of these
twins actually share organs or blood vessels, and if these are vital organs that you can't split or separate, that obviously becomes more problematic and the surgery becomes more dangerous. - [Narrator] Surgeons prefer
to separate conjoined twins before their first birthday, but Artur and Atur were too weak and didn't have enough
skin to cover their wounds. For the past five years, the boys have endured
15 procedures intended to grow extra skin using silicon expanders and finally, they've
grown enough extra skin for the operation to proceed. - [Surgeon's Interpreter]
In their abdomen, they share one liver, the
large and small intestines. There is only one bladder
and one set of genitals. - So this is gonna be tough because the liver,
maybe, you can separate. The intestines, maybe, you could separate. But bladder, what do you do? - [Narrator] Atur will
have a permanent catheter so he can urinate, as
well as a colostomy bag. - A catheter is gonna allow
for the passage of urine. The colostomy bag is
gonna act as the rectum and essentially, store
stool that you can empty. - [Narrator] Although
the operation is over, Dr. Khalil knows that recovery is going to be a major hurdle. Atur is alert and has
been responding well, even managing small
conversations with his parents. But Artur is weak and is fighting a fever. - [Surgeon's Interpreter] Sadly, Artur had a very severe inflammatory syndrome. He wasn't responding
well to any medication and he passed away. - Which happens in a lot of
these cases, unfortunately. - [Narrator] Two years have passed since Atur and Artur were separated. - [Interpreter] This skateboard
was made by my father. Look, it's just a board
and he covered it in foam. - He looks like he's developing well in terms of his muscular
structure, his verbal skills. - [Interpreter] His
recovery is surprising. He's a child that almost
has a normal life. He has a physical disability, but it doesn't keep him from anything. - So he does have a normal life. Maybe a unique life, but a normal life. Click here for the most
unbelievable stories from the ER and don't forget to visit shipstation.com/doctormike to begin your 60-day free trial. As always, stay happy and healthy. (upbeat music)
