In our part one of this subject, we dealt with the phenomena of conjoined, or "Siamese" twins. But our article, today has a similar but even somewhat more drastic departures from the norm in developing fetuses. There are certain genetic errors which cause weird things in some babies. It seems that there are more oddities caused from incest or as we refer in animals as to inbreeding. Then sometimes there seems to be nothing that one can put their finger on to explain the flaws.
I have known of a number of people with certain deformities or abnormalities such as one man whose fingers, next to his little fingers, were the longest of his fingers rather than the normal next to that one. I also new an eldrly man who told of having a brother who had a growth on his nose which had two teeth growing from it.
But there are certain growths known as parasitic growths (which may have been the case of the man's growth with teeth). But we also have some fetuses which are designated as parasitic, since they depend, one way or another, upon the normal fetus for it's nurture.
These parasitic twins normally begin as those of the conjoined twins but for one reason or another, one of them does not develop as does the other and ends up being a non-viable parasite depending upon it's normally developing twin for sustenance. In 1942 a Doctor Marion Kerr delivered a 7 month old male fetus which had a large but undeveloped fetus attached across his buttock. Since surgical separation of conjoined twins and those such as this also was not perfected at this time, exceeding care was given to the removal of this tumor or parasite, but it did have to be removed since gangrene had begun in it. It was a delicate operation since the viable fetus was only seven months and their combined weight was 6 pounds. A portion of the coccyx had to be removed due its displacement from the infant's rectum. However, the operation was successful and the baby survived and did well.
There are records of a number of births with various partially developed parasitic fetuses and some which consisted of only a small portion of development. One little girl grew to 9 years old before it was discovered that she had a parasitic embryo twin still attached to a portion of her stomach. Here are two paragraphs concerning this.
Doctors at the General Hospital in the Greek city of Larissa said yesterday, Thursday, that they had successfully removed an embryonic parasitic twin from the stomach of a 9-year-old girl.
The girl, whose family asked that she not be named, was suffering from stomach pains, which the doctors established were due to a tumour growing on the right side of her belly. She has since made a full recovery, said the hospital authorities.(medicalnewstoday.com)
From what I can discover, it seems that a majority of these growths are safely removed without serious damage to the host child. We should always be thankful when we have a child born without such problems, but it is encouraging to know that most of these can be taken care of.
Here is another instance, a paragraph from the same article as the above:
Perhaps the most famous case of fetus in fetu is that of 7-year-old Alamjan Nematilaev in Kazakhstan in 2003. A school doctor noticed the boy's enlarged stomach was showing movement inside, and referred him to a hospital where they removed what they thought was a cyst only to find a highly developed identical twin brother with hair, fingers, nails, genitals, limbs, head and almost a face.(Ibid)
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