The Boy Who Gave Birth To His Twin

“Imagine discovering that you've been walking around all your life with your twin inside you. This is what happened to Alamjan Nematilaev, a seven-year-old boy from Kazakhstan. Last year he underwent surgery after his stomach became so distended that he looked pregnant. What the doctors found was reported around the world - growing inside Alamjan was his own twin.

The Boy Who Gave Birth To His Twin (Wednesday April 7 at 8.35pm on TV ONE) offers exclusive access to Alamjan's family and the medical team who operated on him.

Living in a remote village in Kazakhstan, Alamjan's family assumed that his growing stomach was the result of rickets and didn't take him to a doctor. However, when he started school, the resident doctor insisted that the family get him to a hospital immediately. Surgeons detected what they assumed to be a cyst. However, when they cut Alamjan open they discovered a large, oval mass covered in veins, nestled in the boy's abdomen.

After a complex operation the mass was removed and surgeons were able to examine it in detail. It appeared to be a baby, with long black hair and what appeared to be limbs, nails and genitalia. The body appeared to be male and alive, sustaining itself parasitically off its brother. If left unchecked it could one day have threatened Alamjan's own life

The doctors were unsure what this apparently humanoid creature was. "We were scared," one admits, "it was unpleasant for us." Dr Virginia Baldwin, a Vancouver-based paediatric pathologist and expert in multiple pregnancy problems, travelled to Kazakhstan to help.

Baldwin concluded that it was a case of fetus in fetu, literally meaning a baby within a baby. This extremely rare phenomenon occurs in the very early stages of pregnancy, where one twin gets trapped inside the body of the other and lives parasitically. Only approximately 70 cases have ever been reported.

tvone.nzoom.com”

“now that is very bizarre”

“Then you don't want to read anything about ovarian cysts...”

“eww”