It is amazing how the human body develops and works.
But in many cases, something can go wrong and certain organs can malfunction. But one woman lived almost 10 decades without knowing her organs are all in the wrong places.
Rose Marie Bentley from Molalla, Oregon had an incredibly rare condition that caused her organs to be in wrong order. Her condition was only discovered after the 99-year-old decided to donate her body to a university.
After she passed away, her body went to Oregon Health and Science University.
She became a part of a medical program that aims to teach young children about the complexities of human anatomy.
As part of the Oregon Health and Science University’s privacy protections, they didn’t allow participants to know any details about the cadavers.
But as students started working, they found out that Bentley had some abnormalities. At first, they couldn’t find her interior vena cava, the major vein on the right side of the heart.
A 26-year-old student, Warren Nielsen, recalled how professors “kind of rolled their eyes. 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!’”
Most of her internal organs were flipped around, a mostly mirrored image of the way the human body should be.
Bentley had situs inversus, a genetic disorder that affects 1 in 10,000 people. She had a rarer type called ‘situs inversus with levocardia’ as she had her heart on the left side of the body while all other organs were flipped around.
People with the condition almost always end up with heart problems but that didn’t happen to Bentley. But she experienced other abnormalities.
One of her lungs only had two lobes instead of three, and her blood vessels developed at odd angles and in odd places.
“I think the odds of finding another person like her may be as remote as one in 50 million. I don’t think any of us will ever forget it, honestly,” assistant professor Cam Walker told Daily Mail.
Her family was shocked by the revelation. Ginger Robbins, her daughter, said: “We had no reason to believe there was anything like that wrong.
“She was always very healthy. … She would’ve just thought it was funny.”
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