Doctors in Churu, Rajasthan came across a rare and surprising case when they had to extract a foetus from the abdomen of an eight-year-old boy. The six-hour surgery was done on Tuesday, April 16, in the DB general hospital attached to Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya Medical College in Churu.
While in the womb, eight years back, the boy had absorbed his brother and his mother gave birth to only one child. However, the foetus of the twin was steadily growing inside his brother. The foetus, even though wasn't in the shape of a human baby, had hair, skin and skull bones, reports Times of India.
When the eight-year-old boy came in for an examination, the doctors thought it was a cyst but with a closer look, they realised that it was a foetus.
"It had hair, bones of skull and legs. It was developing in the cavity of the abdomen of the boy. There must be some vessels, which were feeding the foetus and supplying blood to keep it growing. It was not alive but it was a developmental abnormality in which a mass of tissue resembling a foetus forms inside the body which is known as foetus in fetu in medical terms," Dr Sita Ram, the principal of Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya Medical College told TOI.
Dr Ram went on to explain the condition. He said that when the woman is pregnant with twins, sometimes, one twin gets absorbed into the other. He said that the reason why this happens is not yet known. The foetus which was absorbed then continues to grow in its twin's body in fetu. The foetus will feed off the blood supply of the host but will not be formed like a baby.
The foetus which was retrieved from the eight-year-old weighed three kilograms, and doctors who operated on him said that they had never seen a case like that.
