A 45-year-old woman had already been through one round of treatment for a burst appendix. An abscess measuring about seven centimeters had been drained through the skin; antibiotics had cleared the infection, and she went home. Two months later, the pain in her right lower abdomen came back.
Surgeons went in prepared to find a tumor. What the pathologist eventually found in the specimen was stranger and, in its way, more consequential: she had been born with two appendices, and one of them had quietly filled with mucus. The case was posted online in early September by the American Journal of Case Reports, from a surgical team at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital in Delhi.
