Arifa Sultana was 20 years old when she gave birth for the first time at a rural hospital in Khulna, Bangladesh.
No one imagined what would happen next. Just 26 days later, abdominal pain took her to the Ad-Din Hospital in Jessore as an emergency, where doctors discovered something even they could hardly believe: she was still pregnant, and not with one baby, but with twins.
Arifa had a didelphys uterus, a rare condition in which a woman is born with two separate uteruses, each capable of carrying its own pregnancy.
Dr. Sheila Poddar, who treated her, described it as the most extraordinary case of her career. She had never had an ultrasound before the first delivery, so the second pregnancy went completely unnoticed, even by Arifa herself.
According to the district’s chief medical officer, the odds of such a case are around 1 in 6 million. In the end, all three babies were born healthy, and Arifa recovered without complications, unknowingly becoming a case study for medicine.