A Woman Popped A Growth On Her Son's Knee And Found Something Pretty Gross Inside

Rachel Franklin’s seven-year-old son, Paul, scratched his knee at a beach near their home in Orange County, California. The wound got infected, so Rachel took her son to the doctors. Believing it was the simple kind of infection kids tend to get when they scuff their knee, they sent him on his way with some antibiotics and told them not to pop the growth.  

However, the swelling turned black and began to ooze pus, so Franklin decided to take matters into her own hands and drain it. Turns out, the growth was actually a small sea snail covered in a layer of pus.

“I realised it wasn't a rock. It has whirls on it. I turn it over and I think – I might have laughed out loud. I said, ‘Paul. This is a snail. It’s a freaking snail,’” said Franklin on the program Monster Inside Me, which featured the weird series of events from back in 2013 in an episode that aired on the Animal Planet channel October 29.  Although most people would probably find a small snail living inside them gross, Paul apparently thought it was "cool.”

The sea snail (Littorina scutulata) is a pretty resilient little thing. On the show, biologist Dan Riskin explains the species “can even live outside of water for several weeks by retreating into its shell. It lives in the harshest intertidal zones and can survive for weeks in a wide variety of temperatures and salt levels.”