Are You Two?

You're in labor with your third child. In the delivery room with you stands a court-appointed observer, watching. The state has accused you of welfare fraud. They're already threatening to remove your other two children from your care. The contractions are coming closer and closer, and the moment your baby is delivered, they're gonna perform the DNA test, right then and there, so everyone can see.

That test will reveal you are not this newborn's mother. But how can this be? We just witnessed this infant emerge from your birth canal, your body. If you're not a surrogate, and this isn't science fiction, what in the whole hard-to-believe-it's-really-happening Handmaid's Tale hellscape is going on here? And they got a small beam of light again.

And it's a red, black, blue, brown, white. Oh! True, weird, stuff. Female bodies, am I right? So much drama, so much conflict, so much painful history, so much superstition and mistrust. Damn! Literal centuries spent trying to resolve the mysteries and control the outcomes of female biology. And although human knowledge has leveled up step by painful step, right into this present age of technological wonder and dazzling DNA party tricks, people haven't changed all that much from the old witch-hunting days.

Then, as now, we were so sure of our facts, so quick to suspect trickery and evil. You know, once upon a time in this country, a person could be sentenced to hang based on a neighbor's report of having a dream involving the devil. They called that spectral evidence back in the 1600s. There was no forensic science back then.

And even if you could have explained DNA to our ancestors, they probably would have figured you were a demon and then they'd have drowned you in the nearest river. But we're not like that anymore, you see. Today, that kind of kooky evidence will be left right out of court because standards of evidence evolve. And today, we rely on real evidence, hard evidence, science!

We don't condemn people based on weird dreams or the cunning way a black cat might lounge in a patch of sunshine outside a village church. Those were pure technical nutjobs back then, right? We're modern, educated people now. We understand DNA. TV crime shows have probably been huge in helping reinforce the idea that DNA evidence is unquestionable.

After all, aren't we all unique? Are individual DNA the ultimate form of ID, the one kind of proof that just can't be argued against? Turns out, it is just the tiniest bit more complicated than that. That mom in labor, the one being scrutinized by the court-appointed observer, what we didn't know about DNA then nearly cost her her family and possibly her freedom.

Her name is Lydia Fairchild, and what happened to her 20 years ago could easily happen again. It could happen to you. It might already be you. To make any sense at all of what went down with Lydia Fairchild, we're gonna need to go on a quest. And don't be scared, but there are monsters waiting for us, an ancient three-headed fire-breathing beast and also Maripovic.

We'll journey deep, deep, deep, deep inside ourselves because we think that we're all alone inside our bodies. We believe that we are each one single unique person. But what if that isn't true for you? What if you aren't one? What if you are two? Vanishing Twin Syndrome. Man, it sounds so cool you can hardly believe. It's a real medical phenomenon and not a show streaming on Netflix.

I first became completely obsessed with Vanishing Twins after seeing the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding. And this is just one way you can tell that I am a random weirdo and not an official trained scientist. See, in the movie, Andrea Martin plays Aunt Vula. And in this scene, she welcomes newcomers to the family by sharing a deeply personal story.

Now you are family. Okay. All my life, I had a lump at the back of my neck right here. Always a lump. Then I start the menopause and the lump got bigger. From the hormones, it started to grow. So I go to the doctor and he did the biopsy. Inside the lump, he found teeth and a spinal column. Yes, inside the lump was my twin.

No freaking way, right? Except, yes, way. So much way. You could totally have a twin in your neck, for real. Listen, listen. In 2015, a 26-year-old woman from Indiana had surgery to remove a tumor growing deep in her brain. That tumor was found out to be a fetiform teratoma, which is a fancy way of saying her embryonic twin.

Shut up! The surgeons found bone, hair, and teeth inside it. Endless screaming, the stuff of nightmares. But don't worry, though. This is a very, very rare situation. The surgeon who removed it said it was only the second of its kind in the 7,000 to 8,000 brain tumors he'd operated on. And the patient, who is my absolute hero of dark medical comedy, described the tumor as, quote, the evil twin sister who has tortured me for 26 years.

Folks, this is what resilience and a positive attitude look like. Wow. Vanishing Twin Syndrome, though, is not quite as rare as having your embryonic twin living rent-free inside your brain. And thanks in part to advances in fertility treatments, aka IVF, it's actually a little more common now than before. Or so it seems. Why do I say seems?

Okay, let's start with what Vanishing Twin Syndrome actually is. It's a type of miscarriage that occurs very, very early in a pregnancy where there's more than one fertilized eggs. They call those gestational sacks, by the way, fertilized eggs. And I think that someone should immediately create a line of maternity clothes with that name.

Gestational Sacks. Organic cotton, one-size-fits-all comfort for the mama-ma-go. Use promo code TRUEWEIRD to get a free pair of gestational socks to wear with your gestational sack. Okay, back to the vanishing part of a twin pregnancy. There are actually two types of those. Dizygotic and Monozygotic. And those get abbreviated as DZ and MZ.

And we will now be using those abbreviations so that we can be more like the cool med school kids. Your DZ twins are two separate eggs that are fertilized by two separate sperm. And that's how you get fraternal twins. And actually, those two eggs can be fertilized at two different times. So you might have one baby that you conceived on Tuesday and another baby you conceived on Friday.

Or I don't know what you're up to in your life, but it doesn't have to be at the exact same moment. So interesting. Now MZ twins are one egg that splits into two. That's how you get identical twins. We actually have a set of each in our family and it's fascinating. It's just, let me tell you, it is wild to see identical twins and fraternal twins interacting.

It's crazy. Anyhow, vanishing twin occurs very, very early in pregnancy, typically before the 12th week. There's no way to predict it or prevent it. And there's no way to treat it. What happens is basically this. One of those two fertilized eggs fails. Genetic abnormalities, right? It just was not meant to be. And that failed egg may be absorbed by the surviving embryo and the mother.

And all of this is harmless and generally unnoticed and absolutely undetectable. Yeah, maybe you had a little bit of spotting or cramping, a little bit of back pain or pelvic pain. But all of that is actually really normal in a pregnancy and in a typical or spontaneous pregnancy. And spontaneous means there was no fertility or IVF intervention.

They usually don't schedule an ultrasound until week 12. So if you had a vanishing twin, they've all been vanished by then. And you never knew that your little bundle of joy actually started out as a duo. In IVF pregnancies, though, it's a different story. For starters, in IVF pregnancies, ultrasounds began right at around week six.

So you and your medical team have a much more thorough understanding of what's happening inside your uterus. And often IVF treatment involves the transfer of multiple embryos, not all of which may ultimately be viable. So one statistic indicates that somewhere between seven and 36 percent of IVF multiple transfers are diagnosed with vanishing twin syndrome.

But before you get all worked up over that, Remember that IVF pregnancies are monitored much earlier and way more aggressively than spontaneous pregnancies, right? Which means the vanishing twin syndrome is something they're able to diagnose more frequently. But experts believe that vanishing twins are probably just as common in spontaneous pregnancies.

And if we use ultrasound monitoring in those pregnancies starting at week six, we probably see exactly that. And here's something to think about. The risk of vanishing twins jumps in cases where the mother is 30 years old or older. And according to the latest U.S. census, 30 is now the median age for a woman in the United States to have her first child.

So you put all that together and you could theorize that more people than you ever imagined started out or will start out with a little roommate. Which brings us back to Lydia Fairchild. When we last saw her, she was smack in the middle of having a baby with an official court observer watching her do it. Because that's not too weird or invasive.

And even though everyone in the room saw literally everything, the DNA test on that newborn was a giant nope for poor Lydia. In the fascinating documentary about this case called The Twin Inside Me, Lydia was like WTF? I mean, I couldn't eat for like days. I was I was like such a nervous wreck, shaky. I couldn't focus. I was just so like, what is going on?

I know these are my kids. I know I carry these kids. I know I gave birth to these kids. I was so confused. To answer that, let's dust off the copy of the Iliad that we were supposed to read in 10th grade. But Cliff Notes, am I right? Come on. It was written in the 8th century B.C. We were all being held hostage by puberty. Some corners definitely got cut.

But a lot went down in the approximately 700 pages of the Iliad. The moment that matters to this story is when Homer described this fearsome monster, quote, a thing of immortal make, not human, lion front and snake behind a goat in the middle and snorting out the breath of the terrible flame of bright fire. They called the monster chimera, a terrifying combination of creatures all mashed up into one immortal nightmare.

The chimera is a thing of mythology, although some scholars believe that it might have been Homer's poetic take on an erupting volcano because those ancients did love the drama. But who knows, though? Right. Was the chimera a real animal? Probably not. We lion, snake, goat, what Homer had quite the imagination, but human chimeras.

Those are real. A human chimera is a person with two completely different DNA lines in their body. So how, if each of us possess unique DNA, can some people end up with extra? How can some people have the DNA of another human being just riding shotgun in their cells? Human chimeras and can actually happen a couple of ways. So maybe you had an organ or a bone marrow transplant.

Most of your DNA will be your own, but you've got company now, your donor's DNA. And just as like a little aside, you know, you hear of people that get like an organ donation and there are reports that their personalities change a little bit or suddenly they like foods that they didn't like before. Max, you've seen those stories. Yeah, I have. Yep.

And we're always like, how can that be? You know, how can Kathy, who has a new heart from a guy named Dan, suddenly like puppies and want to ride a motorcycle? Well, I don't really know the answer to that. But could it be in Dan's DNA that's now riding shotgun in her body? It's a really interesting idea to think about. And we'll probably do an episode on that in the future.

But anyway, back we go to human chimerism. So one way is organ or bone marrow transplant. Another way is maybe you were pregnant once upon a time and you now have a little souvenir called micro chimerism, a very little souvenir, like maybe one fetal cell for every five hundred thousand of your own cells. And I I got to be honest, I love this idea that the thought that like a cell or two from each of my children might be floating around inside me.

I'm like so sentimental that way. But what about the vanishing twins, everybody? Remember when they vanished before week 12 of the pregnancy? It's not like they left and went to 7-Eleven when those non viable embryos vanished. They were actually absorbed by the surviving twin and possibly the mother as well. And that's called tetragametic or fusion chimerism.

And this is what happened to Lydia Fairchild. The standard DNA tests, hair, skin, saliva, blood, they all ruled Lydia out as the mother of her own two children. And when that third DNA test on that brand new, freshly born human came back showing that Lydia was at best her own child's aunt, all hell broke loose because this time even the state had to admit that Lydia was not scamming the test.

Can you imagine what this was like for her? You'd think you were losing your mind. How could you not be the mother of the child you just gave birth to? Well, that's because the fusion chimerism that caused Lydia so much grief is brutally hard to detect because there are typically few to no outward signs. I have read of cases, though, of people with fusion chimerism where they had patchy skin pigmentation or two different colored eyes. But heads up, lots of things can apparently cause two different colored eyes.

So if you have that, please don't freak out and start trying to name your vanished twin. And also remember that fusion chimerism like this is pretty rare. They've only documented about 100 cases since 2020. Now, I've said document it because you'd never know that you were a human chimera unless you found yourself in a situation like Lydia's trying desperately to prove that your children are, well, your children and that you are you.

And before you think, oh, I am the result of an old spontaneous pregnancy. So I probably don't even need to think about this. Here's a fun fact. Some experts suggest that the prevalence of human chimerism is actually closer to 10 percent of the whole population. Spontaneous pregnancies and IVF. That's one in 10 people. People, that's true. Weird stuff right there. Now, hold on. Sit tight, Maury Povich, because we are getting to you, I promise. But first, I want to get back to Lydia. And thank God she had a super, super diligent lawyer.

That guy, Alan Tindell, was so intrigued by the bat crazy happening to this poor woman that he took her case. And then he took a deep dive into the worlds of medicine and genetic testing. Believe it or not, Lydia was not the first person to go through this bizarre hell. Tindell found the case of Karen Keegan, whose genetic testing for a kidney transplant indicated that she was not the mother of her kids. So the National Institutes of Health stepped in and said, bring this Karen to the manager. And after studying her like a bug in a jar, it was discovered that Karen Keegan was a textbook case of fusion chimerism.

Armed with this info, the lawyer Tindell was like, you guys, you need to check the DNA in every organ in Lydia's body because I think she's got this vanished twin situation going on. Well, you know, they rolled their eyes, but back they came with their swabs and their test tubes, hair, skin, blood, the inside of Lydia's cheek. And again and again, the results said you are not the mother.

Until finally, for the love of God, they went ahead and swabbed her cervix. And I don't know why it took so long, because doesn't it feel at this point like half the courthouse had been up in there for a little peek? This time, this time the results were clear. Lydia Fairchild was the biological genetic mother of all three of her children. How pissed off would you be in her shoes? No, seriously, like, how pissed off would you be? How pissed off would you be?

So I go to court. The prosecutor first words out of his mouth that I remember is we would like to put these children in separate guardianships. I had no lawyer. It was me against the state with DNA evidence. Yep, DNA, the gold standard of evidence, right? And it mostly almost always is, except when it isn't like in the cases of Lydia Fairchild and Karen Keegan, or in the case of a man who had all sorts of legal trouble involving a fertility clinic. The sample everyone agreed was very clearly his and the resulting two children that were genetically his nephews, not his sons.

That's one heck of a vanishing twin story, isn't it? Brothers so competitive with each other. The first DNA test to help you ID the daddy were made available in 1988. Ten years later, Mari Povich launched what will become an absolute pop culture juggernaut on his daytime TV talk show. We're going to be giving paternity tests to the men those mothers believe to be the fathers of their children. And by the end of this hour, no more doubts, no more accusations, just the hard truth. And this is the very first time Morrie delivered the kind of news that was about to reshape his entire career.

All right. Lisa's daughter is 16 months old, Sarah. And she says that Dana is the father. And your mother is not going to be couldn't be here because she had to work so she couldn't come back for the findings. And she's going to be accepting of the findings, right? Whatever they are. All right. Here's the result. Dana, Sarah is your child.

Oh, listen to how measured and thoughtful Mari sounds. He took it seriously. He told Entertainment Tonight once in an interview that he never knew the DNA test results beforehand. He found out at the exact same time as the people on the show and the audience watching. And according to Mari and people who work on the show, they were all real people who had been hyped up by the producers, you know, to really get dramatic.

But it was as legit as it could be. And DNA testing to name the daddy. It turned out to be ratings gold for Mari. Viewers ate it up. And Mari soon found his swagger the way only a person who somehow created both a cultural phenomenon and a signature catchphrase can. Sometimes the results were negative. In the case of one year old Ymir, Aaron, you are not. Sometimes the results were positive. In the case of four year old Bentley, Cody, you are the father. And always, always there was so much intense D.R.A.M.A. on that stage.

The reason why I'm denying the kid is because my other two kids came out looking just like me. Yeah, my ears. They had my hair. They had my eyes. Where's the baby? Look at the nose. He's got my ears. He's got my ears. My kids don't come out looking like me. Personally, I've always had issues with Mari's Who's Your Daddy shows, not because I feared that a bunch of human chimeras were getting railroaded on daytime TV and not because I think I'm too good to watch folks vomiting up every detail of their lives for my entertainment.

My issue was those children because babies do grow up, you know. It cannot be great for anyone to stumble across an old episode of Mari on YouTube and see their own sad, confused little face watching his mom or dad or mom and not dad stomp around and holler about who seed did or did not haul them into this world. Like, I know we're all just having fun here, but you know who else said that once upon a time? The aristocrats of ancient Rome as they nibbled on olives and watched their gladiators, a.k.a. slaves and prisoners, stab, slice, bludgeon and batter each other, not always to the death, but often all in the name of amusement. I mean, I guess Mari isn't that awful, but those babies, those babies, I'm never going to get over it. I actually think about it all the time.

You can buy a DNA paternity test kit at the neighborhood drugstore. Walgreens sells one for $29.99. I checked. It doesn't come with Mari Povich, but you do have to admit it is just astounding that it even exists. And just $29.99? I mean, not bad when you consider how relatively recently DNA was discovered. Here's another fun fact. That was in the 1860s.

Watson and Crick, circa the 1950s, tend to get all the credit for something that other brilliant minds were very, very much involved in. Shout out to Swiss chemist Friedrich Meischer, who actually discovered DNA. And shout out to Rosalind Franklin, who took the X-ray photographs that directly led Watson and Crick to discover the double helix structure of DNA.

Those guys got the Nobel Prize. Rosalind Franklin got nothing and died tragically young of ovarian cancer, but not before she had to deal with a whole bunch of misogyny and mansplaining and the bitter reality that she had not actually shared her work with Watson and Crick. They got their hands on it by other, let's say, more irregular or unorthodox means. And this is something that Watson himself confessed to in his bestselling book, The Double Helix, which was conveniently published after Rosalind Franklin's death. Huh. How about that?

Max sidebar. Yes. Doesn't it blow your mind when you learn something like that? You're like, so wait, everything's a lie. Like there's what? There's so many people that history does not remember for their achievements, but the human race would not have moved forward without them. And I think that is the worst, don't you?

It is. Yeah, absolutely. And I had no idea about any of this. This is just amazing. I always liked potatoes. If only it was that simple. DNA is a great and complex mystery that we are really only just beginning to decode. But we already do know a couple of cool things. Like we share about 44 percent of our genes with bananas. This surprises some people more than others. Because after a career in radio, I'm like, yeah, that fits.

Here's another little fun fact. In the animal kingdom, the majority of marmosets are chimeras. The majority. Most of them are chimeras. There are all kinds of chimeras in nature. Sea anemones, corals, sea sponges. That's just a handful of examples. And we also know this now. We know that it's very possible that one in 10 of us is a chimera too.

Look around. One in 10. Don't you wonder right now who might be carrying an extra set of genetic blueprints? That guy over there? Or how about her? Not just one single line of DNA, but two. Think about it. Because maybe it's you. It's you. Next time on True Weird Stuff, the 90s were wild and we've got a space story for you that's going to make what Matt Damon did in The Martian look like a bunch of potato farming. We'll see you next time on True Weird Stuff.

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