A young girl who was thought about to die without kidney surgery after her original kidneys shut down from painful and dangerous kidney infections was put under surgery and opened up in an attempt to save her life. What doctors found when they opened her up, however, baffled them. Angel Burton had spontaneously grown a pair of new kidneys. The new organs were fully developed and working, and resting on her two older infected ones.
The eight year old is one of the strangest cases of spontaneous generation to ever reach the attention of medical science. Doctors are still at a loss for how this ‘miracle’ occurred. Regeneration is something that occasionally happens in the animal kingdom in certain species, such as starfish, but this incredible medical miracle was something that no one could have ever thought possible in human beings. Had it not been documented thoroughly by the surgeons working on Angel, they would have not believed it themselves.
The new kidneys were not simply for show either. They completely took over the task of the other failing kidneys and essentially brought Angel back to her normal healthy self. The miracle changed not only her own life, but the lives of her family and friends as well. Angel is now listed in good health after fighting with kidney infections for years. But there may be an explanation for this seemingly miraculous event. There is a condition in some British individuals where the body grows four kidneys instead of two. If only two of the four kidneys had been discovered by the scans observing her, it is possible that her condition could have gone unnoticed by doctors until it was time to remove the infected kidneys. Currently doctors say the extra set of kidneys was likely missed because they were directly on top of one another and could have simply shown up as a single set. It may have also been the cause of a condition she was diagnosed with that led to the kidney infections in the first place called bilateral reflux, in which the patient’s bladder valves fail to function properly and urine can end up entering the kidneys causing infection. The relation of the two conditions has not been directly linked in Angel’s case, however. The family is happy simply to get on with their lives and thankful for a return to health for their child who truly seems to either be an angel or watched closely by one.
Was it a miracle that caused Angel to spontaneously generate two new kidneys? Or was the cause to this problem also its cure? For skeptics, the number of scans Angel received for her kidneys would have been incredibly likely to pick up any overlap between the two sets if the doctors had been looking, but her quadruplet kidneys were only noticed by doctors at precisely the moment it would have worked best to save her life. And since the incident she has had no further complications. Angel is expected to make a full recovery both from her surgery and her conditions.