For two days, a 33-year-old woman in the Philippines looked at the people around her and saw something impossible: their two eyes pulled together and joined at the middle of the face. Their bodies looked normal. When she looked in a mirror, her own eyes appeared merged at the midline, too.
Her neurologists traced the problem to a blood clot in the veins that drain the brain, a condition called cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST). Their case report in Case Reports in Neurology, published April 30, 2026, adds to a very thin record of clots like this one showing up as distorted faces. What makes the case most useful to scientists, though, is the shape of the distortion and how quickly it went away.
