There are so many bizarre medical oddities that exist among humans, it would be impossible to list them all. Some, though, are more noteworthy than others. Such is the case with a baby born in China who came out of the womb “pregnant” with her own twins, who were located in her abdomen, near her liver. There were two fetuses, both with spinal chords, intestines, rib cages and other fully formed physical features.
Doctors performed surgery on the child to remove the twins and study them. They were about ten weeks old at the time they were extracted from the baby. This condition is so rare that only about 200 cases of it have been reported anywhere in the world throughout history. The medical name for this fascinating phenomenon is “fetus-in-fetu.”
Experts involved in the case said that doctors had been expecting the baby’s mother to have triplets, but something went wrong. The other two twins ended up far afield of where they were supposed to develop, and somehow found their way into their sister’s midsection.
This particular case of fetus-in-fetu was rather straightforward, with doctors removing the masses from the child’s abdomen. Most likely, the baby will be permanently unaware that she had been harboring her own twins inside her.
That is not always the case.
Some examples of this medical oddity are much more complex and downright disturbing. For example, a seven year old boy from Kazakhstan was discovered to be suffering from the condition, but only after his physician found that something was moving around inside the child’s body. It might sound like the stuff of horror movies, but there was a parasitic twin living inside the boy who had been there since birth. The twin was at a high level of physical development and even had a head and face. He also had arms and legs as well as extremely long, thick black hair and formed genitals.
The boy survived but his twin did not, even though the twin was considered to be technically alive when he was removed from his brother. While the twin had many fully formed physical features, he was not able to sustain outside of his brother’s body. He measured just eight inches in length and weighed four pounds. He had been growing inside of the boy and as a result, the child’s stomach kept getting bigger and bigger. Doctors wondered why his parents did not seek medical attention for their son sooner. They said the boy “really looked like a woman in her sixth month of pregnancy.”
The boy’s parents stated that they will never tell their son he had been pregnant with his own identical twin brother. They simply told him that he had a mass that had to be taken out. Now, doctors are studying the twin, but they say that there is nothing that would predispose a family to have this happen to them. There are no warning signs and no conditions that would raise the risk of giving birth to a baby suffering from fetus-in-fetu.
But if you think the concept of discovering another person living inside a child’s stomach frightening, wait. It gets worse. Some cases of fetus-in-fetu involve the parasitic twin growing inside the host child’s belly, but other cases take an even more uncomfortable turn. How would you like to have a person living inside of your brain?
That is what happened in the case of little Sam Esquibel, a baby boy from Colorado who was born with a foot and additional formed body parts inside of his brain, including a thigh and a hand. Baby Sam’s case may or may not be an example of a parasitic twin, though. Instead, it could be what is called a teratoma: a tumor consisting of fully formed or incompletely developed body parts.
Doctors were stunned when they cut open Sam’s tumor and a highly developed foot “popped out” of the baby’s brain. It was “one for the books,” they said, as they had never seen anything like it before. They are still divided on whether Sam’s case was a teratoma or an example of fetus-in-fetu.
Most cases of fetus-in-fetu are discovered in infants or children who are too young to know what has happened to them. However, that was not the situation for 36 year old Sanju Bhagat of Nagpur, India. All his life, he had been teased about his expanding stomach, but he never knew the cause for his condition. Finally, his tummy grew so enormous that he found he could not breath due to the pressure in his abdomen. He was rushed to the hospital and immediately transferred to the surgical suite.
Doctors cut into his abdomen and watched as gallons of liquid poured out. What they saw next amazed them. First, they noticed that the “tumor” was “full of bones.” Then, they began pulling out a parasitic twin that had latched on to Bhagat’s blood supply and was feeding on him. The twin had grown so large, it was compressing Bhagat’s diaphragm, rendering him unable to breathe. Had the man not been rushed into surgery, he would have died from having his air supply completely cut off.
Once the twin was removed from Bhagat’s abdomen, Bhagat made a complete recovery. However, members of his community still tease him about his condition, saying that he went into the hospital for a tumor and came out having given birth to a baby. Bhagat is relieved to be free of his parasitic twin, and says he has no interest in seeing his brother’s remains. He says he is happy to have moved on with a more normal life.
He is not the only adult to have been diagnosed with fetus-in-fetu. In these types of cases, the person has no idea that they have a fetus inside them and are shocked to discover that they have been harboring another living being their whole lives.
In the example of the baby girl in China, she is expected to go on to live a full life span with no complications from the surgery. These situations might sound strange, but they are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to weird medical oddities. Another condition which shares similar features to fetus-in-fetu is chimerism. This occurs when the person has two sets of DNA: one from themselves and one from an undeveloped twin. This condition may also result in body parts being formed; but not always.
One of the most famous and complex cases of chimerism happened to a woman named Lydia Fairchild, who had to go through a lengthy court battle and the possibility of losing her children forever when a DNA test revealed that they “were not related” to her. Fairchild almost ended up in jail for welfare fraud after she applied for public assistance and was accused of posing as her children’s mother when in fact she was not.
Fairchild had submitted to a DNA test to prove the children were hers, and she was blown away with shock when the results showed that she was not maternally related to her own kids. What had happened was that her twin’s DNA showed up in the test instead of her own. In this sense, she also had another person living inside of her, but in the absence of the body parts that accompany cases of fetus-in-fetu.
Luckily, Fairchild’s quick-thinking attorney had heard of a previous case of chimerism, and had his client tested for the condition. When the results came back positive, Fairchild was awarded public assistance and her children were returned to her.
Cases of chimerism are much more common than cases of fetus-in-fetu, but people who were born with this double DNA rarely ever find out that they have it. It is generally only in criminal cases that their chimerism is revealed.
Situations such as these reveal how fascinating nature is, and how genetic mistakes can result in conditions that we perceive to be bizarre. In reality, things go wrong frequently in the process of conception, and these abnormalities are actually routine signs of entirely natural, if surprising, anomalies.