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• Charlie Curtis of Toronto, Canada, developed Crohn's disease in 2014, Yahoo! News reported.
Although he took medicine, Curtis was hospitalized with his symptoms and had to visit the bathroom multiple times a day. Then he tried a new therapy: do-it-yourself poop transplants, using his mother's fecal matter.
Fecal microbiota transplants, or FMTs, are typically performed by a doctor and involve collecting feces from a healthy donor, mixing it with a saline solution and inserting it in the patient's gastrointestinal tract through an enema.
But Curtis' DIY transplants had an unexpected side effect: Over the four years they did the procedure, Curtis experienced sweating, hot flashes and mood swings -- his mom's menopause symptoms.
Doctors believe hormones in his mom's fecal matter most likely were to blame.
"When I was actually doing the procedure," Curtis said, "I'd feel tingling inside of me. It felt healthy, it felt like it was working." [Yahoo! News, 11/14/2023]
• Kelsey Hatcher and her husband, Caleb, of Dora, Alabama, have three kids under 8 and a busy life, WVTM13-TV reported.
Kelsey already knew she had the unusual condition of having two uteri and two cervixes when she became pregnant for a fourth time.
But when she had her first sonogram last spring, she discovered something amazing: She has two babies on the way, one in each uterus.
"OB/GYNs go their whole careers without seeing anything like this," Shweta Patel, Kelsey's doctor, said. The pregnancy is getting the Hatchers a lot of attention, which Kelsey isn't all that comfortable with.
Both babies are girls and were due on Christmas Day, but doctors say they could have been born hours, days or weeks apart. [WVTM13, 11/10/2023]