A 58-year-old man walked into a hospital in Yinchuan, China, with a lump on his left shoulder that had become painful over the previous week. His shoulder X-ray came back clean. When surgeons went in, they pulled out enough small white nodules to fill a metal bowl, and every one of them looked like a grain of rice. Pathology later confirmed the objects were not rice at all but dead tissue wrapped in fibrin. The case was published in Frontiers in Surgery in July 2026 and corrected with minor changes in September.
