She was just 17 years old when the abdominal pain stopped being normal.
For 5 years, a lump had been silently growing inside her body.
She struggled to eat, felt full almost immediately, and doctors in India suspected a common tumor.
But the CT scan revealed something no scan usually shows: a mass up to 30 centimeters with hair, multiple teeth, bones, and structures that looked like ribs and vertebrae.
It was not a tumor. It was her twin brother, trapped inside her since birth, in a condition called fetus in fetu.
It occurs in 1 out of every 500,000 births, and up to that point science had documented only 7 cases in adults, all men.
She was the first nearly adult woman in whom it was detected. Doctors operated on her and successfully removed the mass, publishing the case in the journal BMJ Case Reports.
Seventeen years living with a secret that not even she knew she carried inside.