Carla Valentine

Carla Valentine Instagram – The Halloween Countdown (“Carlaween”) continues. This amazing image comes from Sanjay Mukhopadhyay (or @smlungpathguy on Twitter) and many of you will recognise this as a Dermoid Cyst or Teratoma. For those of you not quite so familiar I’ll also post the one I have in my collection! – it’s as big as my head and similarly filled with hair, teeth, bone etc. It’s also known – for obvious reasons – as a “monster tumour” which is the Halloween connection. These tumours arise from the female ovary, usually. Ovaries are filled with totipotent stem cells which means cells that have the potential to be any tissue – after all, they’d usually form a baby. In the case of a teratoma they form a benign but strange ‘monster tumour’. I’m posting this one is because Sanjay referred to something called the Rokitansky Protuberance in his tweet (it’s the deformed lumps from which the teeth etc usually arise) and I was surprised to have never heard the term. Many of you know I am a qualified autopsy technician and one of the names most bandied around in our studies is that of Carl Rokitansky (Physician/Pathologist, 1804 – 1878). He has quite a lot of medical terminology named after him and in fact when we eviscerate the deceased at autopsy using the ‘en masse’ method we call it the Rokitansky Method (even though that’s actually incorrect: Rokitansky dissected organs in situ.)
Anyway, the moral of the story is that I learned something new because of Sanjay and I guess no matter how much experience we have we are still learning!
#humanremains #carlaween #teratoma #dermoidcyst #rokitansky #rokitanskyprotuberance #carlrokitansky #halloween #rokitanskymethod #halloweencountdown | Posted on 14/Oct/2023 16:57:01