There are some truly bizarre physical ailments and deformities that befall the human race. Sadly some are truly quite horrifying but most people who have to deal with these kinds of conditions want to be healed, others are perfectly content with whatever is happening to their bodies, but the reasons are often as bizarre as the condition itself. Last year a 101-year-old grandma, Zhang Ruifang, started noticing that a horn-like bump was beginning to grow on her forehead. The horn, situated on the left side, has since grown to a whopping 6cm in length. And now,it appears there’s another one growing on the right side. But rather than freaking out that she’s growing a second devil’s horn, she is actually quite happy about the birth of another one. She’s even refused offers to have it removed for free,
– because she’s never had so many well-wishers and visitors at her home in Linlou, eastern China.
‘At first it was a nuisance sleeping and so on, but now I get people visiting me all the time bringing me food and gifts and asking to take my picture.
‘I had some doctors who said they would cut it off for free but I told them no. In fact I’m quite looking forward to when the matching one has grown a bit,’ she explained.
Youngest son Zhang Guozheng, 60, said he and his five brothers have given up trying to persuade their mother to have them removed.
He said: ‘She is on her own a lot of time and we didn’t pay much attention to it until too late and by then she seemed to be quite attached to leaving them there.’
The growths are likely to be ‘cutaneous horns’ – growths made of keratin, the same substance that makes up fingernails. Although most cutaneous horns are only a few millimetres in length, some can extend a number of inches from the skin.
I suppose if they are not a threat to her health, other than making her look hideously like a devil, what harm is there in keeping the horns. It’s rather sad that she feels she needs to keep them because of the added attention she gets, but how much longer is she likely to live and at least she has a lot of company now, in spite of the rather suspect reasons for being nice to her. It seems a little like a circus freak show, but to each his own. Nature certainly does some strange things.
