Cat Man: The Man Who Underwent Surgery to Look Like a Tiger

Dennis Avner works as a computer programmer

London: He has surgically pointed ears, sharpened teeth, implanted whiskers and tiger tattoos covering his entire body and face. Cat Man, whose real name is Dennis Avner (50), is an American computer programmer by day, and a feline by night. Dennis has devoted much of his life to transforming himself into a tiger and now likes to be known simply as Cat. Claiming he has the soul of a tiger, he even eats raw meat and climbs trees to feel more at one with his animal friends. Cat was in London to publicise the new Ripley's Believe It Or Not! museum. Cat has spent a fortune on changing his face and body into that of a cat, but doesn't regret it.

20 surgeries

He said, "My work began in 1985, when I had tattoo work on my face. Since then I have spent an uncalculated amount on my transformation to tiger, including around 20 operations on my face to recreate my upper lip, implant silicone in my cheeks and implants to enlarge my brow and forehead. "I also have several piercings that I can attach whiskers."

Double life

Cat lives a double life, being a human at work and a cat on weekends. He said, "During the day, I'm like any other man who works in an office. The only difference is I look like a cat. "My free time is when I behave like a tiger. I love climbing trees, but as I get older I'm finding that that's not an easy job." Having so far failed to find his perfect mate, Cat is still on the prowl for a woman to share his life with. He says, "I'm seeing a couple of women now. They understand that being a tiger is important to me, which is difficult for many women to cope with."

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Want a New, Intact Hymen? Go to Malaysia!

Malaysian plastic surgeons are offering a 'new' intact hymen to women who may need to prove their virginity for marital, social or religious reasons. It costs RM 2,500 (Rs 33,000 approx. for a 30-minute surgery, conducted for out-patients, after which the patient should not engage in sexual intercourse for six weeks, the New Sunday Times reported on Sunday.

Among the clientele are foreign students who are leaving the country not just with a new academic certificate, but with an intact hymen. The operation is also attracting some local university students who request for their hymen to be repaired. They are usually in their early 20s and most are in the final year of their studies. "The girls don't come alone (for the consultation and surgery). They come with their boyfriends or a trusted girlfriend," the newspaper quoted, but did not name, a consultant plastic surgeon with a private hospital. "To them, having the hymen intact is not just an important marriage commodity – their very lives depend on it," says the surgeon. – IANS

Meet the Miracle Baby Who was Born Twice: A Medical Marvel

June 6: When her mother was six months pregnant, baby Macie Hope was taken out of the womb for life-saving surgery, then returned for 10 more weeks.

Baby Macie’s ultrasound showed a huge tumor.


When Chad and Keri McCartney say their infant daughter, Macie Hope, is born again, they aren’t referring to religion — the month-old miracle baby really was born twice.

The first “birth” was about six months into Keri McCartney’s pregnancy, when surgeons at Texas Children’s Hospital took the tiny fetus from Keri’s womb to remove a tumor that would have killed Macie before she was born.

The second time was on May 3, when the McCartneys welcomed their surgically repaired — and perfectly healthy — baby girl into the world.

The happy couple talked exclusively to TODAY’s Ann Curry on Friday from the hospital, where they were joined by Dr. Darrell Cass, the fetal surgeon who led the team that performed a surgery that has been successfully completed fewer than 20 times around the world. In Macie’s case, he said, “We were very, very fortunate. It really turned out perfectly.”

The McCartneys’ story began in Keri’s 23rd week of pregnancy, when the couple took their entire family to their obstetrician’s office to discover the sex of the baby Keri was carrying.
“We had our whole family,” Chad McCartney told Curry. “Our four kids had piled into the van, and we headed to our routine ultrasound to find out what the sex of the baby was going to be. That was the big discussion on the way up, so there was lots of excitement.”

A deadly revelation

Everyone went into the ultrasound room, eager to see the image of the fetus displayed on the screen. “All of a sudden the ultrasound tech had a very concerned look on her face,” Chad said. “She rushed our kids out of the room and then informed us there was a large mass on our baby.”

The ultrasound image showed what looked like a balloon growing out of Macie’s tailbone — except that it was full of blood vessels and was as big as the fetus itself. The tumor was noncancerous ... but still deadly.

“This tumor was gigantic,” Cass said. “It was the size of a grapefruit.”
The McCartneys’ obstetrician had never seen such a tumor in all her years of practice. After some research, she discovered that Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston — six hours away from the family’s Laredo home — was one of only three hospitals in the world that specialized in such conditions.

“This is incredibly rare. It’s about one in 40,000 births,” Cass said. “Many times, these tumors
can grow and remain small and they don’t really affect the fetus very significantly. In Macie’s instance, this tumor grew incredibly rapidly … and basically it was stealing the blood that her body needed to grow. She would have died if nothing had been done.”

A fitting name

Keri and Chad went home with the desperate prognosis and decided they needed to name their infant right then.

“We both made a decision that we have a name for her, because we had been told that there was less than a 10 percent chance that she was going to make it,” Chad McCartney said, fighting back tears as he told the story. “We wanted to pick a name that would be appropriate, so we named her Macie Hope — because that was all we felt we had.”

They went to Houston for the surgery, which Cass described, with a surgeon’s understatement, as “tricky.”

“It required that Mrs. McCartney went under a very, very deep anesthesia, about seven times deeper than the average operation,” he said. “That’s necessary in order to have the uterus very, very relaxed.”

He and two other surgeons opened Keri’s abdomen and brought her uterus entirely outside her body. “We had to find an area of the uterus that we could open safely so that we didn’t disturb the placenta,” he explained.

When they found such a place, they opened the relaxed womb and extracted about 80 percent of Macie Hope’s body — which weighed no more than a quarter of a pound — leaving just the head and upper body in the womb. Exposing the fetus to the air carried the danger that she would go into cardiac arrest, and the surgeons worked quickly to remove the tumor and return Macie to the safety of the womb.

That part of the four-hour procedure took about 20 minutes. The surgeons then had to carefully close up the uterus so that it would be watertight, to keep the amniotic fluid from leaking out.
“Then we had to hope that the pregnancy was going to last,” Cass added.

Born again
That hope was also answered. Macie Hope didn’t make it the entire nine months, but, Cass said, “The pregnancy lasted another 10 weeks, which allowed Macie to recover from this tumor that had been killing her.”

May 3, Macie Hope was born again, this time to stay. She and her mother have remained at Texas Medical Center since as they both fully recover from the miracle surgery. Macie still has a large scar on her backside, which surgeons say can be repaired when she gets older.

Keri and Chad McCartney were expecting to take their miracle baby home on Saturday, and they couldn’t have been happier.

We are doing great,” Keri McCartney told Curry. “I am so excited to think that we’re leaving tomorrow.”

She cradled Macie Hope in her arms. The infant, sporting a thick head of hair, slept through it all, prompting her mother to say, “Obviously she is completely at peace and content with it all.”

Source: TODAYShow.com
By Mike Celizic

‘Natural Condom’ Can Prevent HIV: Experts

Sydney: Australian researchers said that they have developed a means of producing a “natural condom” which could prevent the spread of AIDS.

The Melbourne researchers said they believe men could reduce their risk of contracting the HIV virus, which causes the deadly disease AIDS, by applying the female hormone, oestrogen, to their penis once a week.

University of Melbourne researcher professor Roger Short said on Wednesday that use of an oestrogen cream could quadruple the thin layer of the protein keratin on the skin and thereby provide a natural defensive layer.

“You create what you could call a natural condom,” Short told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“You create a biological membrane which the virus can’t get through.”

Short, a strong advocate of the circumcision of men as a protection against HIV, said he had not yet done tests to prove that the virus was defeated by the keratin cover.

But the researchers said the technique, which does not protect against other sexually transmitted dise a s e s or pregnancy, could provide a cheap and simple method of guarding against HIV around the world.

The research, detailed in the Public Library of Science medical journal PLoS ONE, is expected to be tested in clinical trials in Africa. AGENCIES

Scientists Graft Artificial Veins and Arteries in Lab

LONDON: In what has been described as a ‘medical breakthrough’, scientists have successfully grafted artificial veins and arteries onto human tissue in a lab environment. They are now a step closer to actually using synthetic veins and arteries in a coronary artery bypass surgery.

The team combined man-made materials with human cells to make it elastic and durable enough for attachment to the host tissue.

The development, described in the latest issue of the FASEB Journal, could save millions worldwide, according to editor-in-chief Gerald Weissmann.

He described the successful fusing of living cells to non-living substances that actually led to healing by forming a stronger bond as “tantalising”.

This, he said, might even be called a step toward “cyborg engineering”.
For the study, the surgeons developed an elastic scaffold of polyurethane – a polymer used in adhesives, rubber and paint. Using this scaffold, they incorporated human vascular smooth-muscle cells and epithelial cells, which cover internal organs and surfaces in the body.

Then, blood flow was simulated in the artificial grafts to test their durability. Scientists found that as the pulsing fluid flow slowly increased, the artificial graft’s performance actually improved.

“It is only a matter of time before human tissues can be engineered to be at least as good as the originals, and this study moves us toward that reality,” Weissmann said. IANS