A 79-year-old man arrived at a hospital in South Korea after a week of shortness of breath and high fever. His chest CT looked like a worst-case scenario: a lung nodule, enlarged lymph nodes throughout the center of the chest and around both lung roots, fluid and thickening around the lungs, and a web of thickened lines through both lungs.
To his doctors, the picture raised strong suspicion of advanced lung cancer that had spread through the lung's lymphatic channels. It was not cancer. After two less invasive biopsies failed to give an answer, a surgical sample showed diffuse pulmonary lymphangiomatosis, an extremely rare disorder of the lymphatic vessels.
