A 67-year-old woman in Japan had a CT scan because doctors wanted a closer look at an abnormal spot on her lung. The scan turned up something nobody was looking for: a mass measuring 31 by 23 millimeters, a little over an inch across, in her pancreas.
Its appearance pointed doctors toward a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor, a type of growth that can be cancerous. After surgery, the real answer turned out to be far rarer. It was a schwannoma, a usually benign tumor of the sheath that wraps around nerves, and extensive bleeding inside it had made it look like something else.
