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Lakewood Times

Lakewood Times

Lakewood Times

    Woman Lives for 99 Years With Organs in Wrong Places

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    Rose Marie Bentley was not your average 99-year-old woman. Of course, she lived an average life and did normal everyday things. She woke up and went to work as a hair dresser. She was always fascinated by science and she had five siblings. Sounds pretty ordinary, right? Little did anyone know, while she was living her ordinary life, her organs were completely out-of-place.

    On an early spring day in 2018, students began to prep their cadavers in the dissection lab at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland.

    A 26-year-old medical student, Warren Nielsen, and four of his classmates began to prepare their cadaver. They were excited and ready to explore the mysteries of the human body. This was going to be their first time working on an actual human body. Any other time, all of their knowledge was straight from a textbook.

    The cadaver assigned to Nielsen and his team was Bentley’s. She had, thankfully, died from natural causes and went peacefully. To honor and respect the bodies, the students were not given any information about their cadavers, according to CNN News. To the students, she was just another med-school assignment.

    Eager to see what was inside, they began to open her up. They opened her up to examine her heart. To their surprise, they found that she was missing a very large, vital, heart organ. This organ is typically on the right side of the body. Bentley’s, however, was found on the left side. Numerous veins that typically drain the liver, and other parts of the chest cavity, were either missing or sprouting out of random parts of her body. Her right lung only had two lobes, whereas the normal right lung has three. The right atrium of the heart was twice the normal size of what it was supposed to be.

    Shortly after discovering this, Rose was diagnosed with a condition called Situs Inversus with L. This means that most of the vital organs found in her body were reversed. It was like a mirror inside of her body.

    Many were very fascinated by this finding. Lakewood High School senior, and current anatomy student, Miranda Larimer said, “I wish I could have been able to see something like that. It sounds very interesting. I enjoy science and that is, without a doubt, something that is not very common at all.”

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