ATHENS, Greece - A 9-year-old girl who went to hospital in central Greece suffering from stomach pains was found to be carrying her embryonic twin, doctors said Thursday.

Doctors at Larissa General Hospital examined the girl and surgically removed a growth they later discovered was an embryo about six centimeters (more than two inches) long.

"They could see on the right side that her belly was swollen, but they couldn't suspect that this tumor would hide an embryo," hospital director Iakovos Brouskelis said.

The girl has made a full recovery, he said.

Andreas Markou, head of the hospital's pediatric department, said the embryo was a formed fetus with a head, hair and eyes, but no brain or umbilical cord.

Markou said cases where one of a set of twins absorbs the other in the womb occurs in one of 500,000 live births.

More of the article here: Link

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Whoa... Reminds me of Stephen King's "The Dark Half"

Amazing, never even knew that was possible. The first reaction...being a parent...is sadness for her sister, but that's a bit knee-jerk. As long as the little girl was o.k., it's something that could be studied, and possibly learned from, IMO.

This is something I've never heard of. One out of 500,000 chances of this happening, I can imagine the parents reaction, but fortunately this little girl survived and hopefully her recovery will be good.

I saw a show on this on Discovery - it was incredible. The process is called fetus in fetu, and the showed a few different cases of it, one a man had had his twin living in him for over 30 years, another showed a woman who was currently pregnant whose fetus had another fetus inside it, and they surgically removed the parasite fetus. It is a really freaky thing to see, I wish I hadn't deleted the show from my tivo!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetus_in_fetu

that's it ... I could have sworn that I had read a similar story recently.

Wasn't there an x-files episode on that?

I had read of something similar when I was a kid. You have strange things happening when you start looking at the cellular level and what can go wrong.

Yeppers, the ex-carnival folks episode.

"The X Files" Humbug

Wow, is this a replay of my Big Fat Greek Wedding?

*Shudders*......



You ain't kiddin.

that's right, the one twin would disengage and go out to kill. Man, I miss that show, it had some great weird episodes.

OMG!! That is so wrong,but so funny. EEEWWW, BBWWAAAHAAAAA!

Babay! GET! IN! MA BELLAAAY

You did. A man in India had carried his twin brother in his stomach for more than 30 years.

Oh, I would have loved to have seen that show...

Thay had a CSI episode about this type of thing, too. The guy had had his twin absorbed into him before he was born, and therefore had two different sets of DNA - one his, one the twin's. He had left one set of DNA behind at the crime scene, but when they took a mouth swab sample it had the other set, so it took awhile for them to figure out it was the same person.

That was a brilliant episode! Though it was a bit different... It was two people fused as one. Tetragametic Chimera

Kratos loves tv.

That's sad... At least the little girl is better now.

That happened in an episode of the Venture Bros i think. Weird stuff

Yes, that's it! I couldn't remember the name of the condition he had.... thanks, Kratos.

(btw, you can NEVER watch too much CSI..... lol)