Butterfly Delivery - Adrinette

Answers but Questions

Eleven Days After Cigogne

"I seriously thought I had a hernia," Kim repeated again. "One of my sports buddies found a lump in his belly about a year ago, and that's what it was. He overexerted himself, ruptured something in his gut, and his intestines started falling into some cavity. It got infected and swelled up, so he had to have surgery, but he's fine now. I've expected something like that might happen to me, but this? How is this even possible?"

Miss Bustier's class had met up again for the first time in almost a week, but it wasn't at school. The whole class, teacher included, was gathered in a consultation room at the hospital. They were there to speak with a doctor about their mutual health condition. At this point everyone suspected he or she was in the same situation as Kim, but they still had tests scheduled to confirm this mind-boggling news.

"Even the doctor agreed I might have a hernia," Kim continued, "so we got an ultrasound on it... what in the world?"

The pictures of Kim's abdominal ultrasound were spread out on a table for anyone to look at. None of his muscles were ruptured, but the junction of his large and small intestines were distended to accommodate some kind of fleshy sac that had attached itself to the wall, and some tiny form was growing inside the sac. In shape, it looked like a human baby.

When Marinette took her turn looking at the pictures, Tikki poked her head out of the girl's purse to get a look, along with her human. "Hide!" Marinette hissed. Tikki shook her head and motioned to the door.

"What is it?" Marinette asked, once out in the empty hallway.

"This is serious, Marinette! You have to leave me in the hallway."

"What? Why? What if there's an akuma?"

"If there's an akuma, I'll meet you in the bathroom - but I have to talk to your classmates. You'll understand soon enough; just don't let on that you recognize me!"

"Tikki, I -" Marinette gave up; the red kwami had zipped off into hiding somewhere. The girl could only trust her friend knew what she was doing, and go back inside the consultation room to wait.

--

Finally, when the patients' patience was wearing thin, the doctors came in; four of them - a general practitioner, a surgeon, a gastroenterologist, and an obstetrician. None of them knew whose specialty this case fell under, and each was pretty sure it wasn't his own.

"Ladies and gentlemen," the general practitioner greeted them all with a strained smile. "Have a seat around the table; we'll begin our discussion."

Chairs scooted along the floor as people got settled, then there was a quiet waiting for the doctor to speak again.

"When a medical professional sees an unusual case," the surgeon began carefully, "we're trained to handle it as though we've seen it a million times before. Our job is to keep our patients as comfortable and stress-free as possible during the recovery process, but there comes a time..."

"When you have to say, 'I have never seen this in my life, not even in a textbook!' " the GP finished for her.

She sent a disapproving look his way, but sighed and continued. "I suppose we need to get that out of the way," the surgeon conceded, "but rest assured we will monitor this situation very closely; you're in good hands. We will not allow your condition to become life-threatening."

"When I was first notified of Kim's case," the obstetrician put in, "my first thought was whether this young man could have initially been a twin, and fused with his sibling in the womb.¹ Though rare, cases of the sort are not unheard of - but never," the man brought his hands down on the table, emphasizing his last word, "never has the absorbed fetus been alive on discovery. This," he motioned to the pictures on the table, "has a beating heart! Were I to see this in a woman, I would diagnose it as an ectopic pregnancy; that is, development of a fetus anywhere outside the womb. Regardless, an ectopic pregnancy is the closest thing to which I can compare it. About 2% of all pregnancies are ectopic, but they are typically considered nonviable. Only 1 in roughly 3 million ectopic babies survive²; however, if any of you are so inclined as to try to save these little lives, your odds may be a little bit higher. Most ectopic pregnancies take place in a woman's fallopian tube, and in the more rare instances where a zygote exits the reproductive system completely to develop in the abdominal cavity, there is actually a higher rate of survival. Your fetuses are all drastically undersized for the stage of development in which they appear to be. Developmentally, they appear to be at the beginning of the second trimester, but they are only one eighth the size a baby would be expected to be at that stage. For now, at least, they are no threat to anyone's life, and should remain that way if they don't begin to rapidly increase in size. I defer to your gastroenterologist to determine if the obstruction to your bowels is enough to worry about."