Everyone knows that pregnancies can be tough on expectant mothers. You may also be aware that sometimes fetal development doesn’t go as planned, especially so if you’re having twins. Unfortunately, that is just part of the risk when it comes to having children. The body is a very complex organism, and anything can happen — we do mean anything.
One woman from Barranquilla, Colombia found that out the hard way recently when doctors told her that one of her twins was actually located inside the abdomen of the other twin.
“A Twin Inside a Twin: In Colombia, an Extraordinary Birth”, the headline from The New York Times reads.
It’s one of the strangest pregnancy stories we’ve heard in years. Apparently, in rare cases, one twin can actually be absorbed inside of the other.
It’s called a “fetus-in-fetu” birth and has about a one in 500,000 chance of occurrence.
“I told the mother, and she said, ‘What? No, doctor, this is impossible,’ but I explained step by step, and she understood,” Dr. Parra-Saavedra told the NY Times.
While the doctor first thought what he was looking at was a liver cyst, he soon discovered the truth. Inside the one baby’s abdomen was a partially formed, but still growing fetus connected by a second umbilical cord. According to Dr. Parra-Saavedra, the fetus was about two inches long and had a rudimentary head and limbs, but had failed to form a brain or heart yet.
Although it was a high-risk pregnancy, both the mother and doctor decided to go through with it.
Medical staff feared that the internal twin would damage the healthy twin’s organs if they waited any longer, so, at 37-weeks, they delivered the baby via cesarian section.
Luckily, it was a success and the baby girl, Itzamara, was born alive and well.
The next day though, Itzamara did have to have a surgery of her own to remove the fetal twin from her abdomen.
While some people are promoting this story as “the baby that was born ‘pregnant'”, that is not actually very accurate. “Fetus-in-fetu” is its own unique condition — one that is still pretty crazy. Who could ever imagine that a twin could be born with the half-developed twin buried inside its abdomen?
Interestingly enough, the smaller fetus is sometimes called a parasitic twin because it steals nutrients from the other one.
Many times, pregnancies like these are terminated before the baby ever comes to term, and this is one of the rare cases that everything worked out okay in the end.
One other common result of a pregnancy like this if it actually comes to fruition is that the twins may be born conjoined. However, in this situation, only one of the embryos ever completely developed.
The good news is that Dr. Para Saavedra says Itzamara is doing great:
“She has a little scar on her abdomen, but she is a normal baby now except that the whole world is talking about her.”
It’s likely that people in the medical community will still be talking about this fascinating story for many years to come.
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