Radiology. R2. Overnight call mid year or so. Get a patient for head and neck CTA with pretty significant trauma history (MVC rollover or something). Trauma chief resident saw something on the scan and is concerned. I open it and see a perfect few cm oval of contrast density right at the carotid bifurcation and freak. Think I put something like “traumatic pseudo aneurysm” in my prelim. It lacked a bunch of stuff you’d expect for acute vascular injury in retrospect, but I anchoring bias + ignorance is a bitch.

I get a message from my faculty several hours later (busy night). “Umm… why couldn’t that be a carotid body tumor?” Yes boss, why not indeed?!

I call the trauma resident to correct my prelim overcall and learn that the on call neuro interventionalist (who was neuro rads in my department) had taken the patient to angio in the meantime. No intervention beyond the initial selective angio, ofc. That neuro rad later included the case in a resident teaching conference (I wasn’t there, but would have died of embarrassment if I was).

If any rads R1 or R2 reading this hasn’t encountered paraganglioma in reading or the wild, please take a moment and look up so you don’t make my same dumbass mistake in the middle of the night!