It started with headaches and fatigue and ended with a shocking discovery inside the brain.
Something was wrong with Yamini Karanam. This PhD student moved from Hyderabad, India to Indiana to study Computer Science. But her new life in the United States was going badly. The once brilliant student now had difficulty understanding simple articles. When friends and colleagues said something to her, her thoughts were confused in her mind.
Because that’s where the source of Karanam’s troubles lay: deep in the brain.
She went on vacation last fall, but came back even more exhausted. She slept for two whole weeks, skipping class.
Then the headaches started. And then mistakes and quitting work – she wrote on her blog. I went to the doctor. First to two, then to the next.
Then her revelation was announced: the doctors noticed what they believed to be a cyst on the pineal gland – a small, pea-like creature in the central part of the brain that the French philosopher Descartes called the seat of the soul.
I wasn’t scared back then, Karanam wrote. My will was intact because it had not yet been tested. But my energy was dropping and I was starting to feel tired… Months and weeks slipping through my fingers. I have already undergone all possible diagnostic tests. They were followed by visits to the doctors, but none of them said anything useful. The messages the doctor conveyed to the patient and from there to the support system resembled noise. Now they called it a tumor. The medicine of the twenty-first century could only do so much in three months.
Karanam grew sicker and more, and the tumor grew larger and larger. She couldn’t read. Soon she stopped walking too. She was only 26 and she was barely eating. Pain radiated from her head to the rest of her body.
People of science found no connection between my suffering and the results of my research, she wrote. – I thought they would look at my problems and solve them. But they don’t, and neither did they. I was frustrated and furious. Most of all, I doubted myself. When mental health is put into question, the best of us get lost in the answers.
Desperate to save Karanam’s life, her friends set up a donation account online.
Yamini, a PhD student at Indiana University School of Information Technology and one of my best friends, was diagnosed with a pineal tumor a few months ago, the website says. – Over the last six months, she has already visited many neurologists and neurosurgeons in various cities of the country. Most doctors believe that the location of the tumor is a serious threat to the success of surgery and that it can cause irreversible changes to the brain.
Karanam found a doctor, Hrayra Shahinian, who was performing risky brain surgery through a keyhole at an institution called the Skull Fund Institute in Los Angeles. Taking advantage of the $ 32 collected by her friends, Karanam flew to Los Angeles and placed her life in Shahinian’s hands.
Shahinian made a small incision at the back of Karanam’s head and inserted an endoscope into her skull which, through natural channels in the brain, reached the site of the tumor. Then the doctor made a shocking discovery.
The Karanam tumor was not just a tumor. It was a teratoma: a lint of bone, hair and teeth. Frankenstein’s monster in her brain.
Teratomas have perplexed scientists for almost a hundred years. Some speculate that they are essentially twins who never developed and were instead absorbed into the body of a living child. It happens that newborns have large teratomas attached to each other like Siamese siblings.
Sometimes people don’t realize they have them until they reach adulthood. In 2009, British Gavin Hyatt gave birth to an undeveloped twin when a small lump emerged from his abdomen. Earlier this year, doctors in Hong Kong found two partially developed fetuses in a newborn’s abdomen.
It is unclear if Karanam’s tumor was actually her twin, but it was killing her. The Shahinian successfully removed it and it turned out not to be cancer. Now the doctor is predicting a complete recovery of Karanam.
This is my second time in my life, he said of an intracranial teratoma, and I think I’ve removed seven or eight thousand brain tumors by now.
When Karanam woke up in the hospital, she was amazed to learn that her tumor was not just a cluster of cells but, as she described it in an interview with NBC 4, the evil twin who had tormented me for 26 years.
Karanam should physically return to normal within three weeks, but the brushing of death obviously did not leave her indifferent. Her blog is titled N Phases of Her Tumor, which is a mathematical joke about her transitions. It shows a blue cloud with a smiley face that can easily be mistaken for a tumor that has been removed from it.