It started as a hard, smooth lump on her left cheek, two or three millimeters across, painless enough to ignore. Fifteen years later it was a sharply curved projection four centimeters long, and doctors at Bach Mai Hospital in Hanoi described it as looking like a large rooster's spur.
The case, published May 14 in Case Reports in Medicine, is striking for its size and duration. It is instructive for a different reason: the horn itself is rarely the medical problem. What sits at its base can be.
