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Baby Nisha was born to a set of laboring parents in Tamil Nadu, southern India. Her parents noticed immediately that their daughter had a strangely swollen stomach, but they couldn’t afford the necessary treatment.
When Nisha was 15 months old, her swollen stomach had engorged so much that she was crying all the time from pain and couldn’t eat or drink.
Her parents could no longer stand by. They took their daughter to the hospital, where doctors initially assumed the girl had a large cyst in her stomach.
Professor and surgeon Dr. Vijayagiri performed an ultrasound on the growth and was finally able to provide Nisha’s parents with a proper diagnosis of their daughter’s condition.
The ultrasound “showed that there were bony areas, calcified region and a teratoma-like structure (a tumor containing tissues and organs).”
Nisha was diagnosed with fetus in fetu, an abnormality in fetal development where a mass of tissue that vaguely resembles a fetus forms inside a child within their mother’s womb. A seven-pound mass of bone, flesh, and hair had been leeching Nisha’s blood supply through a structure vaguely resembling an umbilical cord.
Dr. Vijayagiri immediately decided to perform surgery on Nisha to remove the mass.
The procedure was more complicated than initially anticipated: Nisha’s left kidney had attached itself to the mass, blood vessels had wrapped around the growth, and other organs were also in close proximity to it.
Thankfully, after a two-hour surgery, Dr. Vijayagiri was able to safely remove the fetus from Nisha’s body. She is recovering well and will be able to return home in a few days.
Her mother, Sumathi, is “thankful to doctors for removing the fetus and giving [Nisha] a new life.”
