Is this man pregnant? Not really. But sort of. There is, in fact, a fetus inside his distended belly. But it’s the fetus of his unborn, malformed twin brother.
I know this sounds like bad science fiction or something straight out of the pages of the National Inquirer. But it’s legit.
Here’s the story . . .
All his life, Sanju Bhagat, a farmer living in the city of Nagput, in India, had a big belly. He wasn’t a fat man; in fact, his face, arms and legs were stick-figure thin. But his stomach was huge. It was so round and oddly taught that Bhagat looked pregnant.
Then, in 1999, the 36-year-old Bhagat started to have trouble breathing. Fearing that the bulge inside his abdomen was caused by a giant tumor, Bhagat was whisked to the hospital for an emergency operation. When the surgeons cut into his belly to remove the tumor, gallons of fluid splashed out. When the lead surgeon reached inside the body cavity to feel around for what they still thought was a tumor, he encountered something entirely unexpected and almost unspeakably grisly: bones, limbs, human hair and a pair of perfectly formed human hands complete with long fingernails.
What the doctors pulled out of Bhagat was the mishappen body of his unborn twin brother.
How is this possible? Bhagat had a bizarre and extremely rare condition called fetus in fetu. What happens is that when the twin feti are in the womb, one gets absorbed by, or trapped inside, the other. This happens very early in pregnancy. One twins grows normally while the trapped lives on as a parasite, leaching off its sibling’s blood supply.
Normally, both twins die in utero because neither gets enough nutrients to survive. But in very rare cases, as with Bhagat, both twins are born alive. The dominant twin grows and develops normally except for a noticeable bulge in his (or her) belly. The nested twin, meanwhile, survives for a time, living as a parasite and feeding off his host’s blood.
How rare is this condition? There are fewer than 90 known cases in medical history. And in most of those instances, the entombed twin is discovered and excised early on.
But, incredibly, Bhagat carried his brother inside him for three and a half decades.
Today, Bhagat is reportedly fine and lives a relatively normal life–at least as normal as one can be knowing that you gave birth to your own twin.
But hey, stranger things have happened. Or, actually, maybe not. This is probably one of the strangest things that can happen to anyone.
Source: ABC News
If you can’t get enough of this strange tale, check out the video below. But be warned: some of the images are pretty disturbing. This footage is not for the squeamish.
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