In Colorado Springs, an extremely unusual tumor was removed from a 3-day old baby’s brain—a tumor that had developed a foot.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Dr. Paul Grabb peered into the microscope at Sam Esquibel’s 3-day-old brain, set on removing a tumor that threatened the infant’s life.
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What the pediatric neurosurgeon saw made him spring back in shock.

A foot!

As he surgically removed it, Grabb also found other partially formed appendages and what appeared to be ropes of an intestine tucked within the folds.

Sam survived the Oct. 3 brain surgery at Memorial Hospital for Children and is home with his parents and doing well. But his introduction to the world marks one of the strangest moments in medical history.

“It looked like the breach delivery of a baby,” the pediatric neurosurgeon said last week, “coming out of the brain.”

An exact diagnosis is unknown. The growth might have been a teratoma, a congenital brain tumor composed of foreign tissue such as muscle, hair or teeth. But such tumors typically are not as complex as a foot or hand.

It might have been a case of fetus in fetu, a developmental abnormality in which a fetal twin begins to form within another, but those have most often occurred in the torso and not the brain.

“You show those pictures (of Sam) to the most experienced pediatric neurosurgeons in the world, and they’ve never seen anything like it,” Grabb said.