KAMPUNG BUNDAR, Indonesia - Inside a dimly lighted living room in the heart of the Javanese forest, Dede Koswara blankly examines his bulky hands, which have morphed to the size of catcher's mitts. He shuffles along on blackened, bloated feet, a prisoner of his own mutinous body.
For years, the slender construction worker watched helplessly as his limbs broke out in a swath of grotesque barklike warts that limited his mobility.
At one point, he seemed to sprout contorted yellow-brown branches 3 feet long. Koswara, it appeared, was becoming half-plant.
His mysterious ailment cost him his marriage and independence. Begging for coins, he ended up in a traveling freak show, enduring stares, known as the Tree Man of Java.
"They say I'm not human," the 39-year-old says softly. "Whatever they want to say, that's fine. I guess I am a Tree Man."
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Then he got lucky. In 2007, after Koswara's picture was posted on the Internet, a U.S. dermatologist consulted in the case determined that he suffered from a bizarre medical double-whammy:
Koswara, he said, has the common human papilloma virus, a condition that usually causes small warts in sufferers. But Koswara has a rare immune deficiency that allowed the lesions to run wild.
"I'd never seen anything like it - under all those warts was the outline of a human being," said Anthony Gaspari, chairman of the department of dermatology at the University of Maryland's School of Medicine, who traveled here to examine Koswara.
Working with local doctors, he designed a drug treatment program. Last year, surgeons used an electric saw to cut 13 pounds of warts and decaying matter. The results were astounding. For the first time in a decade, Koswara could make out his toes and fingers.
After months in remission, though, his disease has begun to wage a counter-assault, the warts returning to cover his body at a faster rate than ever before.
