When someone gets diagnosed with a brain tumor, it usually means a bad and alarming thing. But for a 26-year old woman from Indiana, she just received worse news. Apparently, the brain tumor which left her sick for some time was actually her unborn twin.
Upon surgery, doctors found an embryonic twin which has bones, hair, and teeth in the brain of Yamini Karanam in a hospital in Los Angeles, California. Karanaman is a doctorate student at Indiana University and had difficulty studying due to various symptoms she was experiencing. She cannot eat and she always feels pain from her head radiating down throughout her body.
Karanaman wrote in her blog as reported by Washington Post, "Then came the headaches. Slips and misses at work followed. There were doctors. First, a couple of them and then more."
Diagnostics and examinations showed that she has a pineal tumor after a cyst was located in that area in her brain, Times of India reported. In March 2015, she met a doctor, Hrayr Shahinian, performing innovative brain surgery termed as a radical keyhole surgery at Skullbase Institue in Los Angeles. The examination entails creating a hole in the brain and using an endoscope to see the tumor.
To the doctor's shock, the tumor was actually a teratoma which many believed to be a twin of the person that never developed into a fetus. For centuries, teratomas have baffled scientists on the subject if it is really an unborn twin or a rare tumor. According to Medscape, teratomas are germ cell tumors commonly composed of multiple cell types derived from one or more of the 3 germ layers.
The surgery was a success and to her relief, it was not cancerous. The procedure cost her $32,437 which her friends helped to raise. She is now on the way to recovery.
Dr. Shahinian reports that he had performed about 7,000 - 8,000 brain tumor surgeries in his years of practice and this case was just the second he encountered.