That is horrific. Poor child. May God help us.
An outstanding incident took place in
the medical practice of Saudi
doctors. A year-old girl turned out to be pregnant. Doctors
said that it was the first incident in the history of modern medicine.
Arab
media outlets discuss whether the removal of the fetus from the
baby girl is going to be considered a murder.
It turned out that
the mother of the pregnant baby originally had two embryos during her
pregnancy. One of the embryos began to develop in the uterus of the
other child. In spite of the fact that doctors describe the incident as
unique, there can be other similar examples found in history.
A
36-year-old farmer had the embryo of his twin brother removed in the
town of Nagpur, India, in 2006. The man asked for
medical help only
after his swollen belly hampered his breathing. Doctors were
certain that the man had a gigantic
tumor in his belly. However, they
found fragments of human genitalia, hairs, limbs and jaws in the patient
and finally removed a weird underdeveloped creature having legs and
arms with
long nails.
In 2002, Indian doctors
found a fetus in the body of a six-
month-old boy. The dead fetus, which
surgeons removed from the boy, weighed one kilo, whereas the boy
himself weighed 6.5 kilos.
The anomalous phenomenon is known as
fetus in fetu. Such incidents are extremely rare: an embryo inside an
embryo may appear once in 500,000 pregnancies. The phenomenon always
occurs at an early stage of pregnancy. As a rule, the fetuses die in
mother’s womb. It may also happen that a child with a fetus
inside survives the entire pregnancy. In this case the embryo continues
to live inside its owner’s body like a trapped
parasite.
A fetus
in fetu can be considered alive, but only in the sense that its
component tissues have not yet died or been eliminated. Thus, the life
of a fetus in fetu is inherently limited to that of an invasive tumor.
In
principle, its cells must have some degree of normal
metabolic
activity to have remained viable. However, without the gestational
conditions attainable (so far) only in utero with the amnion and
placenta, a fetus in fetu can develop into, at best, an especially
well-differentiated teratoma; or, at worst, a high-grade metastatic
teratocarcinoma. In terms of physical maturation, its organs have a
working blood supply from the host, but all cases of fetus in fetu
present critical defects, such as no functional brain, heart, lungs,
gastrointestinal tract, or urinary tract. Accordingly, while a fetus in
fetu can share select morphological features with a normal fetus, it has
no
prospect of any life outside of the host twin. Moreover, it
poses clear threats to the life of the host twin on whom its own life depends.