College Med Student

Sanju Bhagat’s stomach was once so swollen he looked nine months pregnant and could barely breathe.

Living in the city of Nagpur, India, Bhagat said he’d felt self-conscious his whole life about his big belly. But one night in June 1999, his problem erupted into something much larger than cosmetic worry.

An ambulance rushed the 36-year-old farmer to the hospital. Doctors thought he might have a giant tumor, so they decided to operate and remove the source of the bulge in his belly.

“Basically, the tumor was so big that it was pressing on his diaphragm and that’s why he was very breathless,” said Dr. Ajay Mehta of Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai. “Because of the sheer size of the tumor, it makes it difficult [to operate]. We anticipated a lot of problems.”

Mehta said that he can usually spot a tumor just after he begins an operation. But while operating on Bhagat, Mehta saw something he had never encountered. As he cut deeper into Bhagat’s stomach, gallons of fluid spilled out — and then something extraordinary happened.

“To my surprise and horror, I could shake hands with somebody inside,” he said. “It was a bit shocking for me.”

Removing the Mutated Body

One doctor recalled that day in the operating room.

“He just put his hand inside and he said there are a lot of bones inside,” she said. “First, one limb came out, then another limb came out. Then some part of genitalia, then some part of hair, some limbs, jaws, limbs, hair.”

Inside Bhagat’s stomach was a strange, half-formed creature that had feet and hands that were very developed. Its fingernails were quite long.

“We were horrified. We were confused and amazed,” Mehta said.

A Mutated Body Within a Body

At first glance, it may look as if Bhagat had given birth. Actually, Mehta had removed the mutated body of Bhagat’s twin brother from his stomach. Bhagat, they discovered, had one of the world’s most bizarre medical conditions — fetus in fetu. It is an extremely rare abnormality that occurs when a fetus gets trapped inside its twin. The trapped fetus can survive as a parasite even past birth by forming an umbilical cordlike structure that leaches 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 Mehta, there are fewer than 90 cases of fetus in fetu recorded in medical literature.

- source ABC News

The doctor on his morning round was a tired man with a hang-over.

Upon finding patient on bed # 7 dead, he took out a note-pad from his huge coat pocket and wrote down instructions for the boys to carry the body to the mortuary.

The time was 8 AM.

However while writing down instructions for the boys to carry the body to the mortuary he wrote ‘Patient on bed # 8 died at 7 AM.

The boys arrived at bed No. 8, removed the patient ruthlessly and threw the ‘body’ on the stretcher when the patient started protesting, “Hey. It’s not me!!”

“Shut up man” said the guys.” You seem to think you know better than the doctor himself!!”

Usually I wouldn’t say disease can make the world a better place.

But this site I found gives pretty good examples of diseases (albeit fake ones) that would indeed make the world a better place.

Maybe better isn’t the word for it?

Funnier…definitely.

Thanks for stopping by at CollegeMedStudent.com, a site that is bound and determined to at least make you giggle or nod your head in relate-able experiences.

Everyone I know seems to have similar stories when dealing with the whole med school thing and what these stories usually have in common is that they are funny.

Everyone has heard about the “foreign object” in the x-ray or the accidentally removed testicle incident and this is the perfect place for telling these fantastic/disturbing stories.

So if you have one or would like to throw in your 2 cents, drop me a line at my email DeeOhSee@gmail.com (D-O-C,  get it? lol) or leave me a comment here.

I can’t wait to hear what everyone else has seen, witnessed or been through.