I’ve looked up Vanishing Twin Syndrome, and almost every article I have seen said that VTS typically only happens during the first trimester of the pregnancy.
But here’s the catch: My mom didn’t realize or know she was pregnant with me until 7 months into the pregnancy. And when she found out, the ultrasounds did show two babies. Me and my twin.
If Vanishing Twin Syndrome usually only occurs during the 1st trimester, is there a reason why it can happen so late during the pregnancy, as in the case with my mom and my twin? Or is there technically another name for this specific situation?
Well, the key word is usually
Late term vanishing twin syndrome is a thing. It comes with its own set of issues as well. Since its also extremely rare, you’d have to be some kind of nerd to know it exists unless you’re an obgyn or at least a maternity nurse. I am neither an obgyn or a maternity nurse.
When it happens late term, and 7 months is very late term for it, you get an increased rush of complications, some of which can negatively impact the development of the remaining fetus. Hell, from what I remember, late term absorption tends to happen because there’s something going wrong already. Iirc (and don’t try to cite me on a test or anything), just being a little too cramped can trigger it, though it would be a very rare trigger for an already absurdly rare thing.
So, my best guess as a non doctor with zero access to the records of the pregnancy in question is that something happened to put the pregnancy at risk, and either your mom’s body or yours set off the cascade leading to the failure of the other fetus. It isn’t something that happens that late without some triggering event that’s outside of a normal pregnancy. When it happens early on, it’s a different story, it can happen for no detectable reason at all. But late term? Something went wrong that made it happen.
I’d have to go digging, and I’m currently brain fried, but one of the more common triggers worldwide is/was malnutrition. When the mother isn’t getting resources to grow both critters, either her body shifts to support one exclusively, or one of the two essentially cannibalizes the other. That one (again, I’m old and tired, so the iirc factor is iffy here) is most likely to happen when the twins share a placenta, or something like that (see, old man brain missing details).
Since you’ve said in comments that you were placed in an unusual orientation and/or location, that would point to some kind of issue with the uterus not having enough room for both fetuses (fetii? I think I like that better despite it not being duet correct lol). I seem to recall a case in India where a woman prone to twins had a pregnancy where this happened because her uterus had lost the ability to stretch the way they normally do. Something about scar tissue maybe? Been ages since I read about this stuff.
Anyway, late term vanishing twin syndrome is the terminology I know of. If there’s another, more formal terminology, iam not aware of it.
She’s raising your twin in the attic to keep as a spare in case you decide to become a “prompt engineer”
Flowers in the Attic 2: IRL Boogaloo
Your mom said the doctor told her the ultrasound showed “two babies” but I had an ultrasound at 5 weeks and they looked at the tiny embryonic speck and said, “there’s the baby!” In fact no babies are shown in ultrasounds, only fetuses. But my point was, they may have seen one 7-month fetus and one little shriveled thing and said “there’s two babies.”
I guess it’s also possible she brought two babies to term, made a “Sophie’s Choice” to give one up for adoption, and didn’t want you to be heartbroken or afraid of being given away too. And since other people had heard about her being pregnant with twins, she gave you a story you could accept as a child.
And another possibility is that the doctor gave her anesthesia or rohypnol or something and took the twin to put up for adoption, telling her it was absorbed. She’d know she had given birth but not remember it was twice. It’s terrible but not unheard of.
You could ask her, if you feel you’re both adult enough now to handle the emotional implications of all the possible explanations. Remember that you can still trust her love no matter what, but she might not know the whole truth and/or might be ashamed to admit it.
took the twin to put up for adoption
Lol my mom used to tell me how doctors / medical staff in China were sketchy af and sometimes they trafficked children… a problem fueled by One Child Policy and fertility issues and society’s obsessive desire to have children and especially a “male heir” to “carry on the bloodline”, so my mom told me stories about how “oh X person in Y province found that his parents arent his real parents and the hospital trafficked him and sold him…”
Idk why mom keep telling me these stories, terrified me as a kid…
Sometimes I wonder if I am even the real biological child of my parents… 🤔
Who is Sophie?
Meryl Streep movie, she could save only one child from the Nazis (or they’d have killed both, the cruelty was the point) and the guilt and trauma stays with her throughout her life.
I was implying that if your mom had to give up one twin for adoption it might still be a painful thing she doesn’t want to talk about.
She didn’t give up the twin, the twin died.
It’s a reference to a movie of the same name.
The gist is that at one point, Sophie is forced to choose which of her children die.
I’m no obstetrician but something the size and complexity of a 7 month fetus does not get absorbed, it comes out. There is likely some misinformation involved along the way.
No, no misinformation. Everything I wrote in the post is exact what my mom told me about her pregnancy and my birth, and what she told me was what the doctors told her what happened.
Your mom didn’t tell you the truth, plain and simple. Whether she knows the truth, that’s another story. You can’t re-absorb a whole baby, with bones and all that.
You calling my momma a liar‽
He’s saying the misinformation came from your mom or the doctors.
A fetus doesn’t just disappear. Most likely it was given up for adoption or it died.
Why would OP’s mother bring up the ultrasound in the first place if she were deliberately trying to conceal anything?
I could see the twin being stillborn and the doctors thinking it was easier to tell the mother it had “vanished”, though.
TBF, subconscious feelings of guilt often come out in seemingly illogical ways such as this. Not saying that’s definitely what happened, but it’s a possibility not to be summarily dismissed, either.
This is what I was getting at.
I understand that, but i don’t think the misinformation was coming from my mother if that were the case. She told me exactly what happened and exactly what the doctors told her.
My mom is what’s known as an ‘unreliable medical historian’… she very often hears something completely different from what her doctor tells her. I don’t want to say that she lies, because I think a ‘lie’ is a conscious choice that people make… but I also don’t think she’s incapable of understanding what her doctor tells her. I think she just has an idea of what the doctor is going to say, and when it is different she has a hard time letting go of her expectation and replacing it with reality.
I have no idea if this relates to your mother or situation in any way… but if I took everything my mom said her doctor told her then she is the most unique medical specimen ever. Her diabetes is unlike anyone else’s because she can still eat whatever she wants, when she wants… her doctor said that it’s not a problem. And her diabetes has changed from type 2 to type 1. As she was preparing for spine surgery she was convinced that she’d be back home, on her own in 2 weeks (it was closer to 9 months). She swears that the only surgeon that her primary care doctor wants her to see is 2 states over, 6 hours from any of her family (I’ve looked him up, he’s decent, but by no means a unique surgeon). And lots of other strange stuff over the years, including when I was a child.
How sure are you about that? She would know if she gave birth twice, and a 7 month old fetus doesn’t vanish. There’s something she’s not telling you.
The second fetus may have been terminally underdeveloped, and small enough to be delivered without realizing it was a second baby. They may have told her there was no second baby or that it was part of the afterbirth, or she may have misunderstood what they said.
Doctors have been known to lie to patients in the past, but the practice is not very common anymore in most cultures.
Because my mother has never lied to me. So why would she lie about something like this?
That’s how im sure about it. So if there’s any misinformation about it, it’s not from my mother. The doctors, maybe, but not my mother
It’s possible she’s just wrong, not lying.
Which is all great but doesnt eliminate the likelihood of misinformation being the cause. Someone tryjng to protect another from what really happened. Whst does your dad say of the day?
He didnt show up until after I had been born.
So he doesn’t really have any sorta say
“Fetus papyraceous occurs in 1 out of 12,000 pregnancies and 1 out of 200 twin pregnancies.”
Instead of absorption, it could have been papyrification, but apparently that leaves a kind of unmistakable trace for a doctor, which you mentioned so I assume was involved during birth. If pregnancy was non-standard in more ways then just finding out late, maybe those remains were so small that they were harder to notice?
I couldn’t find a written record of a similar situation where a second twin that was seen at 7 months and just vanished afterward, so this could be a unique mix of circumstances. That also makes it statistically a lot more likely that somewhere along the lines, information was missing, or got garbled in chaos, or was misheard, not unlikely during extreme situations like birth. I’m not even thinking about bad intentions, just all the places where one human error could be the missing puzzle piece.
Can you think of any extra information regarding your time during pregnancy and your birth you are willing to share?
It sucks that you couldn’t live with your twin, although I can imagine you have made you peace with it since. Having siblings can be a lot of fun, I know I love it :)
Oh actually, I have other siblings
In fact, I’m the youngest of 7
Well, for those wondering how my mom didn’t realize she was pregnant until seven months in, I apparently wasn’t growing in her stomach. So she didn’t see any significant or concerning weight gain.
I was somehow lying completely flat in her back for most of the pregnancy.
As for my twin, I’m not sure. My mom said two babies were seen in the ultrasound results but what happened to my twin now im not so sure. Because my mom told me my twin was absorbed by the womb
You and your vanishing twin were invisible at 7 months.
Your mom was not a little lady, so my best explanation would be that they never saw “both” of these babies at the same time in the ultrasound. They were both you.
No, it doesn’t make sense for the babies to have both been me.
Besides, my mom actually didn’t gain any weight when she was pregnant with me. I wasn’t growing in her stomach
Oh, you are just full of shit. No worries, carry on.
I’m really not full of shit but whatevs 🙄😒
You are The One
There can be only one.
Dating myself with a reference to Highlander.
He’s the two.
She* or They
Read The Dark Half by Stephen King.
Thanks, but I don’t really do horror. I get scared too easily and it makes it so I cant sleep at night
Probably didn’t vanish.
The twin may be inside you. I know someone who also had a twin in the womb and she had a “mass” removed and the mass had hair and nails.
What you’re describing is a teratoma; vestigial twinning and chimerism don’t generally present that way.
South Park?
… as someone who’s had many XRays and cat scans done in my life, I feel like a mass would have shown up long before now
Makes much more sense if this all happened at 7 weeks vs. 7 months…
Nope, my mom really didn’t realize she was pregnant with me until seven months.
And funny enough, that’s the part people are always in disbelief in, not the twin part
It could also be plausible that your twin was not viable, and did not develop in utero. So when she says they found your twin in the ultrasound, perhaps what they saw was whatever remained after the earlier absorption.
So what you’re saying is, my twin could have already been mostly absorbed, but still showed up in the ultrasound?
I’m no radiologist, but yeah. That makes the most sense. And I bet the doctors would have presented it in a positive way for your mother at the time, to prevent her from feeling any sort of guilt in regards to not knowing she was pregnant, and how it might have affected your twin.
Well, actually, my twin dying was actually a positive for my mom. She was struggling and couldn’t really see herself taking care of two babies. In fact, she kept on telling the doctors and nurses “I am leaving this hospital with only one baby.”
And she got her wish: she only came home with me
In fact, she kept on telling the doctors and nurses “I am leaving this hospital with only one baby.”
And you still don’t think she might’ve given the other one up?
Nope
She ate the other one.
You’re lucky she didn’t eat you lol
