Mysterious Medical World

Ambiguous Genitalia

 Stella Walsh Olson (aka Stanislawa Walasiewicz) was an American-Polish athlete who won the gold medal for Poland in the women’s 100 m track in 1932 L.A. Olympic Games. Her family immigrated to the U.S. when she was just three-years old, and had lived in the U.S. since then. But at the time of the L.A. Olympics, she couldn’t get citizenship yet, so she represented Poland.

 Later, she had a married life for a short period and continued to live in the U.S.  On December 4, 1980, she met a tragic end. A thief killed her by accident in an attempt of robbery. When doctors performed the autopsy, to their surprise they found both male and female sexual organs on her.  This is called ‘ambiguous genitalia.’  In the history of Olympic Games, there reported 14 cases of ambiguous genitalia before WWII. More surprisingly, doctors found out Stella had both male and female chromosomes (XX, XY) too

Fetus in Fetu

 A foreign news agency reported a strange story on August 31, 2006.

A Chinese man felt an acute abdomen pain while working in the farm.  When doctors opened his abdomen, guess what they found!  It was a fossilized baby.  How can such a bizarre thing happen?  Well, the term for it is ‘Fetus in Fetu.’ It is an extremely rare abnormality that occurs when a fetus gets trapped inside its twin. To define that term, it is when the man’s mother got pregnant; to be more specific, she had twins. But one fetus was moved to the man’s inside and developed for a while. These kinds of cases were reported ninety times in the medical world.

The ABC news reported of a similar story of an Indian man named Sanju Bhagat.  His stomach was once so swollen he looked nine months pregnant and could barely breathe.  First time doctors thought Sanju had a giant tumor inside belly; later it turned out to be another half-formed baby.

Then what happened to the Chinese farmer?  It was not a happy ending. He was O.K., after surgery. But because he couldn’t bear his neighbors’ cold shoulders, he committed tragically suicide.