A kid from a village in India called Ashvik Gahai had been complaining of pain in his mouth for 18 months, but the doctors in his village couldn’t do anything about it so his father decided to take him to the nearest big city Mumbai to sort it out. Once there, it was discovered that he had 232 teeth in his mouth. He was immediately prepped for surgery to get rid of them all because nobody needs that many teeth in their mouth, do they?

It was determined that Ashvik was suffering from a rare benign tumour called a complex composite odontoma, which was basically a single gum that formed lots and lots of teeth. The condition has happened before but the most amount of teeth previously recorded was 37. The reason that Ashwik had so many more teeth than previous sufferers was because his tumour was located in the lower jaw where all previous tumours have been located in the upper jaw.

Dr Sunanda Dhiware, who operated on Ashvik with surgeon Dr Vandana Thorawade  and two assistants in a process that took around seven hours, described the situation:

‘At first, we couldn’t cut it out so we had to use the basic chisel and hammer to take it out.

‘Once we opened it, little pearl-like teeth started coming out, one-by-one. Initially, we were collecting them, they were really like small white pearls. But then we started to get tired. We counted 232 teeth.’

You can check out a couple of gruesome pictures from the surgery below. Ashvik now has 28 teeth.