A 20-year-old woman from Bangladesh has given birth to twins just 26 days after giving birth to her son last month.
After being rushed to hospital feeling ill, Arifa Sultana discovered that she was not just unwell, but that her water had broken, and that she was giving birth to twins.
The newborns were delivered by c-section at Khulna Medical College Hospital, and the boy and girl were delivered safely and healthily with no complications, despite not being monitored throughout the pregnancy.
It was during an ultrasonography that doctors discovered the woman has a double uterus, a condition that left her second pregnancy unnoticed.
“It’s a rare incident. I have seen such a case for the first time. I had not even heard about such an incident before,” the chief of the hospital’s gynaecology department, Sheila Poddar, told local news site Tribune India.
Experts have been left wondering how the extra heartbeats went unnoticed.
Uterus didelphys, a double uterus, is a rare condition and occurs in approximately one in 3000 women, according to gynaecologist and fertility expert Dr Sonya Jessup.
Dr Jessup told Mamamia it is an uncommon abnormality of the uterus and sometimes also the cervix and vagina.
“In a female foetus, the uterus develops when two mullerin ducts (two parallel tubes) fuse and the middle portion disappears to create a uterus. With this process women end up with one uterus, one cervix, one vagina and two ovaries.
Top Comments
I was lucky(?) enough to have the two uteri, two cervices and double vagina variety. I could never work out why tampons didn't do what they were supposed to do. Mum of course, said I wasn't inserting them properly. I had the septum removed from between the two vaginas when my condition was discovered at the age of 22, 11 weeks before I got married.
Unfortunately, I was never able to carry a baby to term but we adore our adopted son who's 41 years old and our two grandchildren. I don't know if this is peculiar to me but I also have other congenital deformities. All internal and all but one midline. It's a weird old body but it's still ticking along at 73. Lol.
Holy moley!