(Article found in Pravda)

Geneticists say that mutations seriously change the set of chromosomes, and people with mutations can thus hardly be called humans. In Yerevan in the former Soviet republic of Armenia, 18-year-old girl Narine Aivasyan shocked doctors with her unusual disease. The girl complained about an abscess on her wrist that had been hurting her for a long period already. When doctors opened the bandage on Narine's hand they saw two very thin thorns sticking out of the hand.

The girl failed to enter a higher education institution after she left school, and had to help her mother about the house and assisted her in a store where the woman worked. The girl was fond of pot plants and devoted much time to looking after her plants. Once, Narine pricked herself on a cactus while watering plants. Some thorns got stuck in her wrist. The parents immediately disinfected the wound but it still festered and even expanded. Narine was reluctant to visit a doctor. She had to go to a hospital in a month when a point of a thorn emerged on the skin right on the place of the red wound. Doctors easily removed the strange object, but more thorns turned up on the same spot soon.

Head of the immunology and virology laboratory at the Armenia research center Tigran Davtyan says the world medicine has never known before that herbal cells may settle down and parasitize on the organism of a human or an animal. Deeper study of the thorns removed out of the girl's wrist confirmed their vegetative origin. It turned out that the thorns belonged to a cactus that many people had at home.

The only way to save the girl was to perform an operation to remove the fistula to stop the cactus from parasitizing all about the organism. The wound healed up after the operation and did not trouble the girl for four years.

Narine's mother says the girl could not recover from the shock for a very long period and feared that the thorns might reappear. The tragedy made the girl reserved and unsociable. But still she kept on looking after her pot plants.

One day Narine noticed her wrist turned red once again but she would not confess to her parents that the disease reappeared. The girl felt her forearm swell and soon a thorn as thick as a match burst her skin.

This time a fistula appeared in a sinew zone. Narine clenched her fists, the muscles pushed new thorns out and doctors removed them with pincers. At that, the wound was not bleeding. Doctors removed from 70 to 100 thorns from the girl's arm every day. But they still appeared later, which suggested there were two or three parasite cells still staying in the girl's organism. Doctors from many countries stated there was not a surgical but rather a microbiological problem.
   
When researchers studied the bigger thorns they arrived at a conclusion that they were no longer of vegetative origin. As a result of mutation, the patient got new unknown cells, some sort of a hybrid of a human and a plant. In other words, the young girl was turning into a cactus....

(Read full article - long - HERE)

Guess that rules out her being a flower child ...LOL

Sorry, I just had to blurt that one out

It reminds me of "The Quatermass  Experiment" (released in the USA as "The Creeping Unknown" 1955). Coincidentally, a UK TV (BBC 4) remake last year co-starred David Tennent as Briscoe. And like the 1953 original UK show, it was broadcast live!  Anyway, in the film, an astronaut has been somehow contaminated with an alien life form, and he begins to absorb, and take on aspects of, other life forms. At one point he absorbs a cactus, and his hand and arm become a human/cactus hybrid.

  Hmm. Wonder if it was the inspiration for the story above...?

~ Viper ~

[Alphamale]

How Credable is the story? i mean, how likely is it to be real?

Well, I don't always remember to include which newspaper or magazine I have sourced a particular item from; but I always make sure I say if I got it from Pravda - get my drift 

[Ghostlyguy90]

I guess thats kinda like flower power.

This is fascinating!
I'd be interested to see how many other plants could have this effect on the human body. Hell, think of the possibilities! If we found out exactly how this works, then we could try the same method when combining human DNA with that of other lifeforms, whether for cosmetic or practical purposes.

[Regina Terra]

I don't get it, plants aren't even related to animals & humans, how can we possibly hybridize?

That's even more extreme than combining a fish and a dog.

It isn't hybridization. Hybridization is breeding one creature with another.
Splicing, on the other hand, is actually introducing the genetic material from one creature to the genetic material of another, and bonding them together. So far it's always been just one step ahead of our current technology, but it is technically possible.
The situation where the woman started growing the plant features, though, is a slightly different phenomena. The cells from the plant parasitized on the human cells, eventually caused the body to synthesize those plants cells.
Make sense?

Do you mean that the human cells acted like soil? Like the plant cells were "planted" into the human cells? Like a seed taking root in soil?

And think about the splicing/bonding possibilities. Just like fruit trees are spliced together to create a different kind of fruit tree, we could splice ourselves and be our own apple trees! MMMM.......

No, the cells didn't act like soil. They violently attacked and fed off of the human cells, which then in turn absorbed them and were able to synthesize them.
It's more akin to an alien invasion than a plant growing

Oh well. There goes my fabulous idea of having year round fresh apple pie!

[Regina Terra]

AH!!! Of course, that's what the very first plants did with chlorophyll cells. They attacked it, absorbed it, then use it in a symbiotic relationship.

It worked so well, it allowed them to take over the world before animals first set foot on land.