MANILA, Philippines - Being told a pea shoot was growing in his lung was the best diagnosis an American man, whose doctors feared terminal cancer, could have hoped for.
Retired Massachusetts school teacher and long-time smoker Ron Sveden, 75, already has emphysema but feared the worst when doctors discovered a tumor-like growth in an x-ray of his collapsed lung in June.
“I was thinking I had a malignant tumor and would need radiation and chemotherapy,” Sveden, who had prepared for his last six months, told Cape Cod Times.
“At 75, I looked back, and I thought about how I lived 23 years longer than my father did.”
But doctors were stumped when two biopsies and 16 samples of the growth revealed no sign of cancer.
So thoracic surgeon Dr. Jeff Spillane was called in to undertake a third biopsy, this time performed under general anesthetic to allow greater probing. Spillane scraped away at the encrusted growth, which revealed not a cancerous tumor in Sveden’s airway but a half-inch sprout.
Spillane, who has extracted all manner of objects from patients’ lungs including peanuts and weed whacker, told Cape Cod Times the sprout was a welcome surprise. “I assumed…that there was a tumor.
“It was nice to make his breathing better, not worse,” said the doctor who often had to remove portions of his patients’ cancer-riddled lungs.
The pea could have made its way into Sveden’s lung as he ate, before becoming frosted in a white crust that then resembled a tumor, he said.
“It was small enough to get down there, but big enough not to get out.”
Doctors told Sveden the rogue pea, which had also caused him low blood pressure, dehydration and even pneumonia, had probably been there for quite a while.
“Whether this would have gone full-term and I’d be working for the Jolly Green Giant (an American vegetable company mascot), I don’t know. But I think the thing that finally dawned on me is that it wasn’t cancer,” Sveden, who ate peas while he recovered in hospital, told The Daily Mail.
A sense of humor has helped Sveden’s recovery, as wife Nancy noted: “God has such a sense of humor. I mean it could have been just nothing, but it had to be a pea, and it had to be sprouting.”
Spillane said it was the sprouting element of the pea that had made Sveden’s case particularly unique, but that paled in comparison to the five-centimeter fir tree found growing in a Russian man’s lungs last year.
Artyom Sidorkin, then 28, was likewise thought to have cancer when he arrived at hospital with chest pains and coughing up blood.
But though the ordeal was now over, with nothing but get well presents of canned peas and pea plants to serve as reminder, the mystery will still linger for Spillane.
“Whether it (was) a pea or a bean ... I’ll never know,” he said of the shoot.