Jakarta -In an unusual case, a surgeon discovered a cancerous lump in his hand that originated from an injury he sustained while performing surgery.
Reported by Live Science, a surgeon in Germany experienced swelling in the left hand near the base of the middle finger. The lump had a diameter of about 3 centimeters.
The surgeon then removed the lump and conducted an examination. The analysis results showed that the tumor was a fibrous histiocytoma, a type of tumor that contains histiocytes, immune cells that migrate to tissues in the body where they shouldn’t and form tumor growths.
This is the same type of tumor that was removed from the patient’s stomach five months earlier.
“After conducting further analysis, the researchers found that the tumor in the surgeon’s hand not only had a cellular structure similar to the patient’s tumor but was also genetically identical,” the website wrote.
The scientists isolated the DNA from both tumors and compared them with unrelated tumors. As a result, they found that the type of tumor the surgeon had and the patient’s tumor were indistinguishable, while the unrelated third tumor looked clearly different.
It turns out that when the surgeon was operating on the patient, he accidentally injured his hand. Although the wound was immediately cleaned and bandaged, the appearance of an identical tumor on his hand a few months later revealed that cancer cells from the patient had inadvertently been transplanted into the surgeon’s body.
The tumor was successfully removed completely through a surgical procedure. Two years after the incident, the surgeon is still in good health and shows no signs of the tumor spreading or returning.
Although such cases are very rare, the accidental transmission of cancer through organ or tissue transplantation has been recorded in several sporadic cases over the decades.
