A unique operation of its kind was recently performed by doctors of a pediatric hospital in the southern Vietnamese province of Dong Nai. From the belly of a seven-year-old girl, they removed the fetus of her unborn twin
Nguyen Thi Hong Hanh (that is the girl's name) was admitted to the pediatric hospital with complaints of abdominal pain. After an examination by doctors, it turned out that inside the girl there is an underdeveloped embryo, which, during the normal course of her mother's pregnancy, could become a brother or sister. The baby was immediately operated on. A foreign body weighing 1.2 kg and 20 cm long was removed from her abdominal cavity. Why it did not disturb the child for so long remains a mystery to the doctors.
Currently, the little patient feels well and is recovering quickly after undergoing surgery.
Such cases, experts say, are quite rare in world medical practice. The embryo in the embryo appears once in half a million pregnancies. Until a certain time, the second embryo continues to develop on a par with the main one, remaining inside it, and when the process stops, the underdeveloped embryo turns into a parasitic body.