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While we've seen enough horror movies about evil twins, truth is still stranger than fiction. A 26-year-old woman had a shocking and freaky revelation when doctors told her that the brain tumor she thought she had turned out to be her embryonic twin. The chilling part is that it had bone, hair and teeth.
Yamini Karanam, an Indiana University Ph.D. student, went to doctors after she started noticing that she had problems understanding what she was listening to and reading, NBC Los Angeles reports. After consulting with neurologists and neurosurgeons who couldn't agree what was causing her medical issues, she reached out to Dr. Hrayr Shahinian at the Skullbase Institute in Los Angeles.
Shahinian thought she had a brain tumor and scheduled a surgery to remove it. One of Karanam's friends even set up a crowdsourced fundraiser to help pay for the surgery.
But after the procedure, Shahinian found out about her embryonic twin, or rather a rare "teratoma," that was never fully developed was in her brain. While we feel like we would have a complete freakout in the same situation, she even joked about it, calling it her "evil twin sister who's been torturing me for the past 26 years."
Since Shahinian thought Karanam's tumor could have been potentially cancerous, he told her that it wasn't an evil twin because it was benign.
Good news is that Karanam is expected to fully recover in less than a month.
Karanam isn't alone though in her startling experience. In 2009, Gavin Hyatt from England, discovered that he had a parasitic twin after a lump in his stomach that doctors thought was a cyst pushed its way out through his stomach like from the movie Alien, according to The Telegraph. He later found he had an underdeveloped twin in his belly, which he now keeps in a jar and calls "Little Gavin."
