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There are certain medical case studies that you find almost impossible to believe. The woman who cried tears of blood every time she menstruated, for instance, or the man who lost all feeling in his legs due to a colossal poop, Then there's this one – one that, even after reading it in a medical journal, we're still not quite sure we can believe.
The story crops up online every now and then of a girl "without a vagina" who gave oral sex. Following fellatio, the tale goes, she was stabbed in the abdomen. 278 days later, she returned to the hospital, where she gave birth to a healthy baby boy via cesarean section.
The whole thing sounds like a bad urban legend, spread around by kids at school. And yet... it's in the medical literature.
Titled "Oral conception. Impregnation via the proximal gastrointestinal tract in a patient with an aplastic distal vagina," the case report was published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in September 1988. Either a real doctor (the author, Douwe A. A. Verkuyl, has been published in numerous other publications, including The Lancet) decided to stake his reputation writing up an urban legend for giggles, or it's just real.
According to the report, a 15-year-old girl showed up at the hospital following a knife incident involving her and two boys. One was her current boyfriend, one was her previous boyfriend.
"Who exactly stabbed whom was not quite clear but all three participants in the small war were admitted with knife injuries," the report read. "The girl had some minor lacerations of the left hand and a single stab-wound in the upper abdomen."
She was taken to surgery, where they performed investigations into her wounds.
"An upper midline abdominal incision to reveal two holes in the stomach. These two wounds had resulted from the single stab-wound through the abdominal wall," they wrote. "The stomach was noted empty at the time of surgery and no gastric contents were seen in the abdomen."
She was closed up and kept in hospital, before being discharged 10 days later. Then, 278 days later, she returned. This time, she had abdominal pains. Turns out, she was going into labor and was experiencing contractions.
Upon inspection, however, they found that the "vulva showed no vagina, only a shallow skin dimple was present below the external urethral meatus and between the labia minora." Technically known as a blind vagina, they found that it was only 2 centimeters (0.79 inches) deep.
Following the birth via c-section of a healthy boy, the medical team dug a little deeper into her story.
"The patient was well aware of the fact that she had no vagina and she had started oral experiments after disappointing attempts at conventional intercourse," they write in the report. "Just before she was stabbed in the abdomen she had practised fellatio with her new boyfriend and was caught in the act by her former lover. The fight with knives ensued."
The girl told the doctors that she had never had a period, and could not believe that she was pregnant – even as her abdomen continued to swell over the course of nine months, and others suggested she might be. Several attempts were made to construct a vagina after this incident, though it was only partly successful.
The doctors concluded that her child, hard though it is to believe, was conceived through the oral sex shortly followed by the knife fight.
"A plausible explanation for this pregnancy is that spermatozoa gained access to the reproductive organs via the injured gastrointestinal tract. It is known that spermatozoa do not survive long in an environment with a low pH," the team wrote. "But it is also known that saliva has a high pH and that a starved person does not produce acid under normal circumstances."
"It is likely that the patient became pregnant with her first or nearly first ovulation otherwise one would expect that inspissated blood in the uterus and salpinges would have made fertilization difficult. The fact that the son resembled the father excludes an even more miraculous conception."
