Some people don’t want to go to the doctor even if they know something is wrong. Grandparents, for instance, can be stubborn about going to the doctor, even if they faint while, say, mowing the yard. “If it’s a stroke, I don’t want to know. I’m ready to go, I don’t need a doctor poking and prodding me.” A 66-year-old patient at the Kwong Wah and Queen Elizabeth Hospitals has done one worse than that. When he went in to seek treatment for swelling in the abdomen, the doctor said that he had a cyst on his ovary. Oh, and also, he was a woman.
This person had the highly unlikely condition of having both Turner syndrome, which can cause women to not get menstruation or be able to get pregnant, and also congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), which boosts male hormones, making the patient look like a man. He had a small penis but no testicles.
“The patient, by definition, is a woman who cannot get pregnant. But she also has CAH, which gave her the appearance of a man,” said Chinese University pediatric professor Ellis Hon Kam-lun. “It’s an interesting and very rare case of having the two combinations. It probably won’t be seen again in the near future.”
Astounding news. You go in for gut trouble and the doctor re-sexes you. The 66-year old Vietnam-born Chinese man intends to continue to live his life as a man, perhaps receiving male hormone treatment now, as the report on him claimed, and as reported by South Morning China Post.
Makes you wonder, in a way, if you should bother seeing a doctor if your gut swells or you get an itch or something else. Maybe it’s best not to know? However, it’s not likely this will happen to you, as there have been only 6 other cases reported of others having the same thing, and none of them were reported so late in life.