The Ashes

Curious thing, folks. Sometimes you just can’t get the force of nature out of your gullet. We’re hearing about a Mr. Artyom Sidorkin rolling up to a hospital in the city of Izhevsk, Russia, complaining of a terrible chest pain. He presented with the coughing up of blood – never a good sign.

The good doctors whisked Mr. Sidorkin away to the X-ray room, where they took a few snapshots of his innards. The pictures revealed a lump in a lung  – also never a good sign. Expertly, the doctors performed a biopsy to see what exactly what growing in there. They were startled to retrieve a five-centimeter branch of fir tree from the lung, resplendent with its dagger-like needles.

The doctors came to the conclusion that, at some point, Mr. Sidorkin breathed in a bud of the tree. The bud then affixed itself to the lung and began to grow.

Mr. Sidorkin informs us that “[the doctors] told me my coughing blood was not caused by any disease. It was the needles poking the capillaries. It really hurt a lot. But I never felt like I had an alien object inside of me.”