A Chinese woman required emergency surgery to have half of her kidney removed after a rough weight loss massage session.
The 41-year-old woman referred to only as Ms. Miao (a pseudonym) reportedly wanted to lose some weight with help of massage, so she went to a salon in Hangzhou, China’s Zhejiang province for a session. Midway through the special weight loss massage, the woman could barely stand the pain in her abdomen, but when she told the masseuse about it, she said that it was just the fat leaving her body. That apparently reassured Ms. Miao and she gritted her teeth through the rest of the session, but the pain in her abdomen only got worse after she got home.
Hours after the weight loss massage, the middle-aged woman started experiencing symptoms like vomiting and diarrhea, and by the time her family took her to a local hospital, she was already in a semi-comatose state. After hearing that she had been complaining of abdominal pain, doctors performed an abdominal CT scan which revealed a ruptured angiomyolipoma in her left kidney.
Renal angiomyolipoma is a benign tumor in the kidney, which doesn’t usually have any symptoms and doesn’t pose any danger. The usual course of action after discovery is active surveillance to ensure the tumor doesn’t grow or start to bleed.
After examining the angiomyolipoma, doctors concluded that, judging by its size, the tumor wouldn’t have bothered Ms. Miao, had it not been for the weight loss massage. Apparently, the session had been so rough that it had caused the growth to rupture, creating a massive hemorrhage.
After performing a renal artery embolization, doctors operated on the woman, removing the bleeding tumor and half of her left kidney in the process, leaving it unable to perform its normal function. Ms. Miao is reportedly still under observation in the intensive care unit at a hospital in Hangzhou.
Source: Oddity Central