In the city of Nagpur, India, Sanju Bhagat's stomach was once so swollen  he looked nine  months pregnant and could barely breathe. Bhagat felt  self-conscious his whole life about his big belly. But his problem  erupted into something much larger than cosmetic worry one night in June  1999. 
Bhagat, they discovered, had one of the world's most bizarre medical  conditions known as fetus in fetu.  It is an extremely rare abnormality that involves a fetus getting  trapped inside of its twin. The trapped fetus can survive as a parasite  even past birth by forming an umbilical cord-like structure that leeches  its twin's blood supply until it grows so large that it starts to harm  the host, at which point doctors usually intervene.  According to Dr. Ajay, there are less  than 90 cases total recorded in medical literature. Fetus in fetu  happens very early in a twin pregnancy, when one fetus wraps around and  envelops the other. The dominant fetus grows, while the fetus that  would have been its twin lives on throughout the pregnancy, feeding off  its host twin like a kind of parasite.  Usually, both twins die before birth from the strain of sharing a  placenta. 




 



 
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