When Ashik Gavai began struggling to bite and chew due to severe swelling on the right side of his face, he took himself to see a doctor.
After a number of tests on the 17-year-old from Buldhana, in western India, doctors discovered an unusual growth on one of his bottom molars and booked him for surgery.
“Initially, it was not very clear what it could be, and so we decided to go in for surgery yesterday (Monday),” Dr. Sunanda Dhivare-Palwankar, head of the hospital’s dental department, told India Times.
As they got to work on fixing the molar, they discovered hundreds of tiny teeth growing inside the tooth, which had grown to the size of a small marble.
“At the final count, we had a total of 232 small pearlies, all independently developing as teeth, coming out of that lone molar,” Dhivare-Palwankar said.
They also discovered a rock-like growth inside the molar which was too hard for the dentist’s drill to remove, with surgeons resorting to an old “chisel-mallet” technique.
The surgery took seven hours to complete and Dhivare-Palwankar said it was the first time she had ever seen anything like it.
She said the “development abnormality” likely formed after Gavai lost his milk teeth. She said the tumor was benign.
Gavai had put up with the pain in his mouth for years as he was unable to afford medical treatment.
The operation was paid for by a government health care scheme for the poor.