The baby was born with her own twin inside – such cases are extremely rare, one in half a million.
33-year-old Colombian resident Monica Vega was expecting the birth of her daughter. It was about five weeks before the due date, the pregnancy was proceeding normally, and there were no signs of complications. However, on the last ultrasound, her gynecologist saw some kind of tumor in the fetus. The doctor suggested that the unborn girl had a liver cyst, and sent the expectant mother to a specialist in complex pregnancies, Dr. Miguel Parra-Saavedra. And he stunned Monica with a completely different diagnosis.
“It was one of the strangest and most curious things a gynecologist can see,” the doctor said. “Basically, the baby was pregnant with her unborn sister.”
As it turned out, it was about the phenomenon of “fetus in the fetus.” Using a color Doppler, the doctor saw that the “cyst” is a real baby with its own umbilical cord attached to the baby’s intestines. Only very tiny.
“Fetus in fetus” appears when a woman becomes pregnant with twins, but one of them is attached by the umbilical cord not to the placenta, but to the vessels of his brother or sister. As a result, as it grows, the larger twin simply absorbs the other. This was the case with Monica.
“For the first time such a case was described in 1808. The phenomenon is very rare, it happens in one case out of half a million, ”said Dr. Parra-Saavedre. Despite his vast experience, even he was surprised. And Monica is completely shocked. No joke – to give birth to a pregnant baby.
At 37 weeks Monica had a caesarean. The doctors were initially going to allow the woman to deliver the pregnancy, but observations showed that the twin suddenly began to grow rapidly and in two weeks increased by a third. It was impossible to pull – it turned out that the smaller twin, in fact, parasitized on the formed baby, oppressing her internal organs, and he himself was not viable. The girl Itzimara was born – big and strong, weighing a little more than three kilograms. The next day, she underwent surgery to remove her twin daughter.
Itzimara on 3D ultrasound and after birth.
The embryo turned out to be tiny – only 45 mm long and weighing 14 grams – it had arms and legs. But there was no heart or brain. The embryo died as soon as the doctors cut the umbilical cord connecting him with his sister.
But sometimes the outcomes of such development – the fruit in the fetus – are different. The child absorbs his twin and only after years, or even decades, does he make itself felt, manifested in the form of a cyst. In India, for example, a rather large cyst was removed from a girl – because of her, a 17-year-old teenager looked pregnant, could not really eat, and her stomach was constantly hurting. The tumor was 30 by 16 centimeters in size, and inside there were hair, teeth, bones – the girl’s twin continued to develop in an incredible way inside her. And a resident of Great Britain had a cyst of 20 cm in size removed from the ovary when the woman was already 45 years old. Examination showed that the cyst was the unformed twin of an Englishwoman.
And Itsimara is doing well now. She has a tiny scar on her stomach, but otherwise this is a completely ordinary child – apart from what the whole world says about her.