werner@aecom.UUCP (Craig Werner) (01/11/86)
[Oops, Sorry to those of you who thought you missed this posting because I forgot to post it when I posted Puzzle #5.] > Since people's skin color varies, to determine the extent of jaundice, > you examine the whites of the patients eyes. One eye is almost orange. The > other is totally normal-looking, showing no signs of jaundice. In addition, > the non-jaundiced eye is not responsive to light. There is only one way an eye could escape being jaundiced, and that's if it's not connected. Since unconnected eyes don't last too long, the other possibility is that it's fake -- which it is, and Glass Eyes don't respond to light. That was the non-medical part of the puzzle. And congratulations to mlf@panda (Matt Fichtenbaum), trudel@caip (Jonathan D. Trudel), and hollombe@ttidcc (Jerry Hollombe). Given a glass eye, then you have to make the medical leap. The most common reason for removing an Eye surgically is Cancer of the Retina, the most common metastatic cancer of the retina is Malignant Melanoma, and one of the favorite sites for distant metastases of malignant melanoma is, you guessed it, the Liver. Most likely diagnosis: liver metastases of a malignant melanoma derived from the retina. I should note that this is a rare but not unheard of condition. John Wurzelmann has seen two. A friend at another Medical School called me back two days after I told her this story, to say they had a patient with the above at their hospital, and a saying amoung the housestaff, "Beware of man with one jaundiced eye." -- Craig Werner !philabs!aecom!werner "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity."