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15-Year-Old Has Unborn Twin Surgically Removed From His Stomach

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The unborn twin of a 15-year-old Malaysian boy has been removed from his stomach, after the fetus was discovered to be the cause of long-standing stomach pain.

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Mohd Zul Shahril Saidin had been hospitalized for the past four months for pain, until doctors determined that it was a case of "fetus in fetu," which occurs approximately once in every 500,000 births. The fetus was highly developed, and had hair, nearly developed genitalia, and legs. 

“The fetus removed from my son's stomach was formed with organs like those of a baby — only the nose and mouth were not complete,” Hasmah Ahmad, the teen’s mother, told the Mirror.

Saidin had reportedly had an “oddly rounded shaped tummy” since the age of one, and has periodically received medical attention for pain.

While Saidin’s case is not the first globally, it is believed to be the first case in Malaysia. 

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The last recorded case of fetus in fetu was a 45-year-old London woman, Jenny Kavanagh, who had a 10-centimeter mass removed from her left ovary, which turned out to be an unborn twin. The fetus had a face, an eye, a tooth, and long black hair — similar to her own.

“I try not to think of it too much because I don’t want to feel sad about it,” she told the Mirror last year. “But I try not to feel sad about it. I try to remember that it had no heart and no brain. And that it would have almost certainly killed me if they hadn’t found it and removed it.”

The doctors treating Kavanagh compared her case to that of an ectopic pregnancy, though the twin had been inside her since birth. For over four decades, the fetus was protected by her ovary, which allowed it to grow. The bigger it grew, however, the greater risk Kavanagh was in of it hemorrhaging.

“The fact that it had long black hair — just like mine — a face with one eye, and one baby tooth makes it more believable,” she said. “It’s difficult to describe how I felt when I saw it. I felt shocked, very scared, horrified, and it felt like an alien was inside me.”

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