She lived for 99 years with organs in all the wrong places

CNN

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

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.
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 and she had a condition called situs inversus with levocardia, in which most vital organs are reversed -- almost like a mirror inside the body. That, along with a host of other weird but wonderful abnormalities, made Bentley a sort of medical unicorn.

One of the professors proceeded to say that the odds of finding another human being like that is 1 in 50 million.

On this March day, the assignment was to open the body's chest cavity to examine the heart. It wasn't long before Nielsen's group began to question their fledgling medical knowledge.

"Her heart was missing a large vein that's normally on the right side," Nielsen said. Bewildered, he and his team called the professors over and asked: "Where's the inferior vena cava? Are we missing it? Are we crazy?"

"And they kind of rolled their eyes," Nielsen said, "Like, 'how can these students miss this big vessel?' And they come over and that's when the hubbub starts. They're like 'Oh, my God, this is totally backwards!' "

Bentley's vein was on the left, and instead of terminating directly into the heart, which is typical, her vein continued through her diaphragm, along the thoracic vertebrae, up and around and over the aortic arch and then emptied into the right side of her heart. That wasn't the only irregularity Walker and his students found in Bentley's body.

Numerous veins that typically drain the liver and other parts of the chest cavity were either missing or sprouting from an unusual spot. Her right lung had only two lobes, instead of the standard three, while the right atrium of her heart was twice normal size.

"And instead of having a stomach on the left, which is normal, her stomach was on the right," Walker said. "Her liver, which normally occurs predominantly on the right, was predominantly on the left. Her spleen was on the right side instead of its normal occurrence on the left. And then the rest of her digestive tract, the ascending colon, was inverted as well."

The condition occurs in only 1 out of 22,000 babies and is invariably associated with severe congenital heart disease. Because of the heart defects, only 5% to 13% live past the age of 5; case reports mention one 13-year-old boy and a 73-year-old who at the time was the second-longest survivor.

Further on in the article, it talks about how she underwent two separate surgeries, and both doctors had no clue that her innards were out of place.
Makes me ponder on either signing up to have my body donated for science or continue to go the old-fashion way - in the dirt - without a casket.

a reply to: LtFluffyCakes96

Amazing. If she was not a cadaver donor then it would never have been known.
I like this part of the article:

"The decision to become a body donor began with Jim Bentley, Rose Marie's husband, but she too "thought it was the greatest thing," Allee remembers.

"There was a poem that my dad found, and it was all about donating your parts," she said. "You know, 'give my eyes to a man who has never seen the sunrise' and the like. He kept showing us the poem. It was really important to them."

The poem, written by Robert Test, opens with the line: "Give my sight to the man who has never seen a sunrise, a baby's face, or love in the eyes of a woman," and ends with "If, by chance, you wish to remember me, do it with a kind deed or word to someone who needs you. If you do all I have asked, I will live forever."

The couple's beliefs about donation made an impact. All three daughters plan to donate their bodies for research."

a reply to: Onlyyouknow

Towards the end of the article is absolutely heartwarming.

Thank you Jim Bently, for informing your wife about the wonders of science and donating your dead body to it.

I am sure that there are more people with this condition than medicine knows about. It may be that this woman's whole family had this, but since they never got sick much nobody knew. Nowadays, they have MRIs and Cat scans that can see this and maybe most of the people with this condition are already gone or are from areas of the world without these scanners. I am sure if nobody knows they are backwards, their lives are better than if the doctors were scanning them all the time with fancy equipment and picking and poking at the person all the time.

I wonder if maybe just her face was on backwards?
And hell no! At what point is it just cutting up another body, for the thousandth time, and you (the intern) decide its time to put 100 sparklers up my dead butt just to freak out the incoming freshman?

So I fly down with the angels singing to see what miracle they are doing with my earthly vessel, and there I am turned into a human spider thing with sparklers in my...you know.

a reply to: LtFluffyCakes96
I seriously doubt that its a 1 in 50 million chance, nor do I see whats so strange for parts and organs to be on the opposite side or even missing.

Or... As an alternate theory, just to make things less boring. She could be from an alternate dimension were everything is reversed and just ended up being stuck here. But lets call this dimension, the reverse dimension, were left is right and apples are oranges, and people at stop signs go on red not green. And not only that but the craziest thing is that Elvis is still alive in that dimension, and so is tupac.

Ohhh! Cue the theme from the twilight zone.

a reply to: galadofwarthethird

I wonder if she was a mirror twin?
One of two mirror twins can have organs reversed.

a reply to: Itisnowagain
Who knows, would not be that hard to find out, if one really wanted to.

But really, why are people so interested about this anyways, seems a bit pointless, after all she is dead now. And as for her condition, as some seem to think it was. Well, how many of them will live to be 99years old.

Not much of a condition and not that big of a deal.

originally posted by: galadofwarthethird
a reply to: Itisnowagain
Who knows, would not be that hard to find out, if one really wanted to.

Not necessarily.... she or her family may not have ever known that she was a mirror twin...... her twin may have died in the womb and may have never been seen or known about.