Woman Discovers She has Two Wombs

Jan. 7, 2009— -- London resident Lindsay Hasaj assumed she was a pretty ordinary person for the first 27 years of her life. She had a nice job in financial sales, got married in July and two months later became pregnant.

But within weeks of the news, Hasaj went to the hospital with abdominal pain. Soon after, doctors discovered she had two sets of reproductive organs; two vaginas, two cervixes and two wombs.

"It was one of the awful cases of being in the room with the sonographer and they're being quiet and evading your questions," said Hasaj. "Then they get up and say: 'Sorry I have to see one of my superiors.'"

Hasaj said she was left lying on the examination table in a panic, at most imagining an ectopic pregnancy. Minutes later the superior came in to look and said quite matter-of-factly, "Oh, by the way you have two wombs and two cervixes," Hasaj said.

"Oh, my husband was absolutely devastated. His first concern was for my health," said Hasaj of her husband, Tony Hasaj. "But this is our first child and it's very much a longed-for child, so we are both walking on eggshells at the moment."

Doctors told Hasaj that she was really very lucky to have conceived so easily and that the baby seemed fine. The pain, it turned out, was only a coincidence and caused by a common ovarian cyst.

"Everything was on the right side, the baby's in the womb on the right side, the cyst was on the ovary on the right side," said Hasaj.

But after that strange announcement came the news that the pregnancy would be high risk. Hasaj's doctor, who was unavailable for an interview, estimated in news reports that she had a 60 percent to 65 percent chance of having a healthy baby at the end of a full-term pregnancy.

Studies of womb malformations estimate that one in 3,000 women have Hasaj's condition of uterus didelphys, according to Dr. Ed Huang, associate director of the OB/GYN Residency Program at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

However, in Huang's experience, a double uterus is much rarer. In 14 years of experience as a doctor, caring for 30,000 women, Huang said he has only seen four cases like Hasaj's.