A woman who suffered through 'terrible stomach pain' learned to her surprise that her body contained five extra organs.
Australian woman Mel Placanica said she was struggling with the pain along with severe bleeding and so went in for a series of tests to try and figure out what was going on.
The 31-year-old from Adelaide said that doctors initially thought they'd found a tumour on her uterus, but those results turned out to be false and Mel had to wait to find out what the issue was.
Advert
She said she'd been going through 'the worst pain I've ever experienced in my life' and her mum took her to hospital.
"Straight away they did a scan, and they saw a uterus and this lump-type shape next to it. So automatically they thought it’s a tumour," she explained.
They also suspected she had a tumour until they did a laparoscopy scan, where a camera is inserted through a cut in the belly to have a look.
Advert
She'd also experienced early menopause in her 30s due to it, however, it wasn't until she went to see a gynaecologist for another scan that she learned the truth.
It turned out that Mel essentially had two vaginas as she had two uteruses, four ovaries, two cervixes and even an extra kidney.
Mel said: “The moral of the story is that you cannot always trust a scan. A scan will not show everything otherwise everything would have showed up on the scan and it wouldn’t have taken as long as it did.
“So, I go to the gynaecologist, and she looks at my scans and she is thinking the same thing – that it looks like a tumour.
Advert
“I found out I had two uteruses, four ovaries, two cervixes – essentially two vaginas.
“I also have three kidneys so I’m assuming that maybe I could have been a twin, and I like absorbed the other one.”
Discovering she had five extra organs would have been a bit of a surprise, and she's since been through procedures to have some of her extra organs removed.
Advert
One of the uteruses and two of the ovaries are gone, and she's now got one cervix.
However, that wasn't the only source of her pain as the lining of her uterus indicated endometriosis, which was a huge factor in the pain she experienced.
Joe Harker