A boy from Uttar Pradesh — named Abhishek in some reports, left unnamed by the hospital — was born with a second, unfinished twin hanging from his abdomen. The parasite had two formed legs, buttocks and external genitalia, together weighing close to 15 kilograms. He could feel touch, pain and temperature in those limbs. They grew as he grew. About 30 to 40 percent of his circulating blood fed them, drawn from a branch of the internal mammary artery that normally supplies the chest wall. He dropped out of school in class eight because other children mocked him. He hid the extra legs under cloth.

Doctors call this an incomplete or parasitic twin: one of a monozygotic pair fails to develop a full body and remains attached to the autosite. True conjoined twins occur in perhaps one in 50,000 to 100,000 births; a parasitic attachment of this kind is rarer still — on the order of forty documented cases worldwide. Most are found at birth or in early childhood. Living with the mass until seventeen is almost unheard of. Prenatal scans that might have flagged it were never done.

He reached the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi at the end of January 2025. A team led by additional professor of surgery Dr. Asuri Krishna mapped the blood supply with CT angiography. On 8 February they operated for about two and a half hours. They divided the artery feeding the parasite; his blood pressure fell as the extra circuit closed, and anaesthetists restored it. The limbs came off the abdominal wall. Inside the belly they found two large cysts — remnants of the unfinished twin — lying against bowel and liver but not invading them. Those came out too. The abdominal wall was closed. He spent a night in intensive care and went home on the fourth day.

He told interviewers he wanted to go back to school and find work. The childhood spent carrying another body cannot be returned. The strain on his heart can stop.

The operation was not a first in medical history. It was a first at that age in that hospital: proof that a parasite fed for seventeen years can still be cut away if the vessels are mapped and the team is ready for the sudden drop in blood volume when the second pair of legs dies.

Sources

The Indian Express and The Hindu reports on the 8 February 2025 AIIMS Delhi surgery

BBC News account of the parasitic limbs and intraoperative blood-pressure drop

Dr. Asuri Krishna’s press briefing on anatomy, blood supply and global case numbers

ThePrint and NDTV coverage of delayed diagnosis and school dropout

News18 and Medical Dialogues summaries of the multidisciplinary team and recovery