An Indian teen boy complaining of chronic stomach pain, vomiting, weight loss and pain was more than shocked to be told that the pain was caused by a malformed foetus of his twin after an abdominal Xray and Ultrasound at the Swaroop Narayan Hospital in Allahabad. The mass weighed 2.5kg and had been feeding off the 18 year old Narendra Kumar through an umbilical cord-like structure connected to his blood vessels.
His diagnosis was ‘foetus in fetu,’ a rare condition with just about 200 cases ever documented worldwide. In this condition the one foetus enters the other through the umbilical cord, and lives there as a parasite. ‘Technically, the foetus was alive and also growing due to the metabolic activity in his body,’ the attending doctor was quoted as saying.