Here’s a medical mystery for any sleuth out there. A woman goes to her doctor and complains of tightness on the right side of her chest. What might be the problem?
If you can guess the answer, you’re one in a million. Or, perhaps one in ten thousand. That’s how many people have our mystery patient’s same condition: situs inversus totalis.
The woman’s heart is on the right side of her body. So is her stomach, while her appendix sits on the left. Situs inversus totalis means that all the organs, blood vessels, and nerves in the chest and abdomen are flipped to the opposite side. And, they’re all mirror images of their normal forms. A normal heart, for instance, is angled down to your left hip. But our patient’s heart angles down to her right.
Situs inversus totalis doesn’t mean that your heart will start bothering you. The pain our mystery patient is experiencing, in fact, doesn’t have anything to do with her flipped organs—for her, it’s simply acid reflux. But her doctor could only figure that out by knowing where to find her heart in the first place.
What’s amazing about situs inversus totalis is it commonly gets diagnosed this way—people with the condition often live completely normal lives, until they seek treatment for an unrelated concern. Then an X-ray or MRI reveals their transposed organs. Since every organ is flipped, the relationship between organs is unchanged, and the body chugs along like normal.
To conclude the mystery, our patient got the care she needed and went on her merry way.
