Doctors discover 40-year-old twin growing inside woman's body

If Jenny Kavanagh had tried to self-diagnose herself using WebMD, "your unborn baby twin is growing on your left ovary" wouldn't have likely come up as the cause for her heavy period. Nevertheless, after visiting a doctor in fear that her implanted contraceptive coil was causing the bleeding, Kavangh, 45, was informed that her undeveloped twin had been growing inside her for the past four decades, The Mirror reports. What's more, the twin had a face, eye, tooth, and long black hair.

"I try not to think of it too much because I don't want to feel sad about it," the world's most casual unborn-twin-carrier, Kavangh, said in an interview with The Mirror. "It would have almost certainly killed me if they had not found it and removed it...I try to remember that it had no heart and no brain."

Kavangh, a London native now living in Cyprus, had previously given birth to two children but rarely visited doctors and had never gone to a gynecologist. Both of her pregnancies had been normal.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

When the doctors told her the news, Kavangh had a hard time believing it — so they showed her a photo.

"The fact that it had long black hair — just like mine — a face, with one eye and one baby tooth makes it more believable," Kavangh said, adding, "I felt shocked, very scared, horrified, and felt like an alien was inside me."