A middle-aged man kept turning up with pain in his right flank. A CT scan found the obvious culprit: multiple stones in his right kidney with mild hydronephrosis, and then it found something nobody was looking for: a well-defined nodule in the right adrenal region, dense enough to look like a solid tumor. Surgery revealed the adrenal gland was perfectly normal. The mass was something that should have formed in his chest.
His case, published in the American Journal of Case Reports in September 2026, is the newest entry in a pattern that has been quietly accumulating in the radiology literature, and the pattern is arguably more useful than any single case in it.
