Woman lived for 99 years with organs in the wrong places

[BetteDavisEyes]

She lived for 99 years with organs in all the wrong places and never knew it

'This is totally backwards'

(CNN) - On an early spring day in 2018, the faint smell of formaldehyde floating in the air, 26-year-old medical student Warren Nielsen and four of his classmates prepped a cadaver in the chilly dissection lab at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland.

Similar groups of five gathered around bodies on the other 15 tables in the anatomy class, all eager to explore the mysteries of the human body they had seen only in textbooks.

The cadaver assigned to Nielsen's team was a 99-year-old woman who had died of natural causes. Her name was Rose Marie Bentley, but the students didn't know that then. To honor and respect the privacy of those who offer their bodies to science, no further details are given to medical students about the person who had once inhabited the body lying on the silvery slab before them.

But as the students and their professors were soon to find out, Bentley was special, so special she deserved her own unique spot in medical literature and history books...

 

[meanmaryjean]

This is called heterotaxy. In my previous life as a Peds ICU nurse, we had a kiddo who had heterotaxy AND his heart was backwards in his chest (front to back) AND he had TGA (aorta and pulmonary artery were reversed). A one in a million combination of defects.

*He had surgery for the heart defect and is fine. But it was sooooo confusing trying to decide where on his chest to listen to his heart!

 

[cody22]

Thank you for sharing this neat "info find."....It would be so easy to get in trouble with "idle musings" posts on this particular thread..................LOL !....moooooooooooooooooooo

 

[watcher9]

“My mom would think this was so cool,” she said. “She would be tickled pink that she could teach something like this. She would probably get a big smile on her face, knowing that she was different, but made it through.”

Mollala Woman Lived 99 Years With Organs On Opposite Sides Of Her Body

 

[Laughing]

A friend in junior high had that condition. Discovered when doctors had a real hard time diagnosising appendicitis since she pointed to the "wrong" side while having all the classic symptoms!