At first his parents must have thought it was a tumour. Their 10-month-old son’s abdomen was rapidly expanding, almost bursting.
Last week in Indonesia’s West Nusa Tenggara, the couple took their baby boy to their local hospital in Lombok, fearing the worst.
Muhammad Abdalul Zikri Hakim’s life now hangs in the balance, but his parents Asmani and Rusman could never have guessed the likely cause. A rare condition where the boy’s own twin is inside his body.
Doctors at the West Nusa Tenggara General Hospital suspect foetus in foetu, a rare condition they have never come across before.
It occurs in one in every 500,000 births, but there is thought to be less than 100 cases documented around the world.
Now the doctors at the basic hospital on the holiday island will have to perform a complicated and rare operation to remove the mass.
They admit they cannot predict the scenarios that could present during the surgery.
Foetus in foetu is described as a condition when a foetus becomes enveloped by its twin in the womb.
The foetus can then survive as a parasite, long after birth.
“The tissues are dead tissues but the blood vessels remain alive,” said Lalu Hamzi Fikri, the director of the hospital where CT scans and x-rays revealed what was inside baby Zikri’s abdomen.
“It’s dependent on the main source or parent, which in this case is the baby.”