True Story: Twins Fused Into One Person

I saw this on a mailing list. Searched briefly for it at the New England Journal of Medicine and saw it mentioned. Pretty freaky, so I thought I'd share it with my freaky friends. :)

True Story: Twins Fused Into One Person

This sounds like science fiction, but it's not. The woman who stars in this bizarre story--which is not from a supermarket tabloid, but rather the venerable New England Journal of Medicine--is now 52 years old. Her name is Jane. Jane had three sons, all grown now and all of whom were conceived and born the natural way. When one of them needed a kidney transplant, she learned that she--the mother--was not biologically related to her own child. Tests proved that to be true for two of her three sons. It's as if Jane conceived and gave birth to another woman's children.

The study, which was more like an investigation, was led by Dr. Margot Kruskall of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. New Scientist reports that Kruskall concluded that Jane is a chimera, a mixture of two individuals. What happened is that Jane's mother conceived two non-identical twin sisters whose cells intermingled in the womb and instead of growing into two people, fused into a single body.

The cells from one twin dominate in Jane's blood, but in other tissues, including her ovaries, cells from both twins live alongside each other. And that explains why two of her three sons have the genetics of Jane's fraternal twin. It's as if Jane gave birth to her unborn twin sister's children. There are about 30 instances of chimerism that have been reported worldwide.

A Very Nano Thanksgiving

Oh, the happiness that that number (31,008, for reference when the image changes) inspires in me. I wrote 4,030 words today, which is a little more than double what my daily goal is. We skipped three whole days of writing, and last night I could just force out a thousand. I had decided to write 3,000 today if I could at all. I wrote about a thousand before hitting a bit of a wall.. and then I finally figured out the Big Thing That's Wrong With Marla with help from my totte, which has been holding me up in a major way for the last fifteen thousand words. I've been writing a lot of filler to get to this point, but I'm finally feeling a little more confident in my ability to go back and move things around and rewrite scenes. My characters are actually gaining some personality, and quirky things are happening with them. I like quirky, so that makes me happy. I'm 62% done and I'm feeling confident about the whole thing again. And I'm back on track for November 30 again. Today's writing, in general, has done wonderful things for my statistics.

I also got the lenses in my glasses replaced today, which makes me happy. The anti-glare junk has scratched off twice already, which is vastly annoying and will be more so when they stop replacing it because the warranty is over. I guess that's a year. I don't know. Anyway, it's nice to be able to see things directly in front of me without tilting my head. :)

And furthermore, there was an hour long Good Eats tonight. I'm dying to brine a bird now, but not enough to volunteer to cook the Thanksgiving turkey next week. The turkey is just one of those things you don't want to get started on making, because then you might very well get stuck with it. I am stuck with broccoli casserole, for example, and my poor lucky cousin Rae is stuck with the rolls, for she cannot cook a lick.

Apparently, there is only going to be one Thanksgiving festivity this year. We used to celebrate it with my dad's family on Thursday and my mom's family on Friday. Now my dad's parents go to my uncle's house in Lexington, and we spent two or three years doing nothing on the actual Thanksgiving day. We ate at Shoney's. It was pathetic. Anyway, year before last, Mom decided to do a Thanksgiving event at her house for those of us who aren't doing anything else (read: going to inlaws) on Thursday. I started calling it the Reject Thanksgiving, which Mom and I were both inordinately fond of, especially since it annoyed the crap out of my dad, who kept saying that it was NOT a reject party. It turned out to be quite a nice event, actually. This year, when we asked about Thanksgiving and what would be happening (things are kind of different with the other side of the family now, too, since everyone is all grown up and a couple have to work at various odd times) my Mom piped up and said that it was going to be at her house on Thursday. So it seems that we've successfully stolen a whole holiday. I wonder how that's going to work out, since my aunt has to go to her inlaws, and my uncle gets very testy when she encroaches on his family's time with them.