Yikes! From apcnews:
ATHENS, Greece (AP) – A 9-year-old girl who went to hospital in central Greece suffering from stomach pains was found to be carrying her embryonic twin, doctors said Thursday.
Doctors at Larissa General Hospital examined the girl and surgically removed a growth they later discovered was an embryo about six centimeters (more than two inches) long.
“They could see on the right side that her belly was swollen, but they couldn’t suspect that this tumor would hide an embryo,” hospital director Iakovos Brouskelis said.
The girl has made a full recovery, he said.
This isn’t the first of these stories to pass over the Blather desk. Back in 2003 a similar story was carried by the BBC:
Doctors in Bangladesh say they have removed a long-dead foetus from the abdomen of a teenage boy who was complaining of stomach pains.
They said the foetus would have become the boy’s twin had it grown normally in their mother’s womb.
They said it was a case of an extremely rare condition where two foetuses are conceived as conjoined twins but one absorbs the other.
And sure while we’re at it – here’s another one from India in 2007:
‘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.”‘
