Aug. 23, 2006 Sanju Bhagat's stomach was once so swollen he
looked nine months pregnant and could barely breathe.
Living in the city of Nagpur, India, Bhagat said he'd felt
self-conscious his whole life about his big belly. But one night in
June 1999, his problem erupted into something much larger than
cosmetic worry.
An ambulance rushed the 36-year-old farmer to the hospital. Doctors
thought he might have a giant tumor, so they decided to operate and
remove the source of the bulge in his belly.
"Basically, the tumor was so big that it was pressing on his
diaphragm and that's why he was very breathless," said Dr. Ajay
Mehta of Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai. "Because of the sheer
size of the tumor, it makes it difficult [to operate]. We
anticipated a lot of problems."
Mehta said that he can usually spot a tumor just after he begins an
operation. But while operating on Bhagat, Mehta saw something he
had never encountered. As he cut deeper into Bhagat's stomach,
gallons of fluid spilled out and then something extraordinary
happened.
"To my surprise and horror, I could shake hands with somebody
inside," he said. "It was a bit shocking for me."
Removing the Mutated Body
One doctor recalled that day in the operating room.
"He just put his hand inside and he said there are a lot of bones
inside," she said. "First, one limb came out, then another limb
came out. Then some part of genitalia, then some part of hair, some
limbs, jaws, limbs, hair."
Inside Bhagat's stomach was a strange, half-formed creature that
had feet and hands that were very developed. Its fingernails were
quite long.
"We were horrified. We were confused and amazed," Mehta said.
A Mutated Body Within a Body
At first glance, it may look as if Bhagat had given birth.
Actually, Mehta had removed the mutated body of Bhagat's twin
brother from his stomach. Bhagat, they discovered, had one of the
world's most bizarre medical conditions fetus in fetu. It is an
extremely rare abnormality that occurs when a fetus gets trapped
inside its twin. The trapped fetus can survive as a parasite even
past birth by forming an umbilical cordlike structure that leaches
its twin's blood supply until it grows so large that it starts to
harm the host, at which point doctors usually intervene.
According to Mehta, there are fewer than 90 cases of fetus in fetu
recorded in medical literature.
Fetus in fetu happens very early in a twin pregnancy, when one
fetus wraps around and envelops the other. The dominant fetus
grows, while the fetus that would have been its twin lives on
throughout the pregnancy, feeding off its host twin like a kind of
parasite. Usually, both twins die before birth from the strain of
sharing a placenta.
Sometimes, however, as in Bhagat's case, the host twin survives and
is delivered. What makes his case so unusual is that no one
suspected Bhagat had a twin inside him for 36 years.
Bhagat said he was very much relieved after his operation. He was
not interested in knowing what Mehta did to him or seeing what he
had removed from his abdomen.
"He didn't want to see it because it was looking very ghastly,"
Mehta said.
