Brit man gets 5-inch dragon horn removed from back

Brit man gets 5-inch dragon horn removed from back

LIVERPOOL, UNITED KINGDOM — If you ever thought it was a good idea to ignore whatever that thing is that's growing on your skin, don't — or else you could end up dragon horned like this guy.

According to the British Medical Journal, doctors were surprised to discover a 5-inch long "dragon horn" growing out of a 50-year-old man's back.

But no, he wasn't turning into a scaly fire-breather.

In reality, the "dragon horn" was a cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, a fairly common type of skin cancer.

What's unusual is how massive it got — which is what happens when you neglect that cancerous skin lesion for 3 whole years!

SCC cases are usually seen in older people with light skin with a weak immune system and lots of sun exposure.

In this case, the patient was a low-risk manual laborer, who wasn't immunosuppressed and had no significant sun exposure or family history of skin cancer.

And unlike most folks battling skin cancer, there wasn't anything abnormal with his lymph nodes either.

To treat the man, doctors had to surgically remove the horn along with a good chunk of healthy skin to make sure no cancer got left behind.

They then took a skin graft from his thigh to patch up the deep wound.

What's mind-boggling is that healthcare in the UK is free.

So everyone who has to deal with America's crappy system probably wants to know why the dude didn't just go to a doctor?

Treatment would've been a lot less gnarly.