Pregnant Man

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.