What if one day you found out that none of your biological children are related to you?
It was a nightmare one could only imagine, but a mother in Washington State almost went to jail and almost lost her children when she found herself in the middle of this baffling mystery.
Lydia Fairchild was mulling over the DNA results she got in 2006. It was slowly eating at her perception of reality because the results were saying something that she couldn’t stomach to believe. Lydia Fairchild’s DNA does not match her kids.
“I knew that I carried them, and I knew that I delivered them. There was no doubt in my mind,” Fairchild said to ABC News.
The mystery began when Fairchild applied for financial assistance from the state.
She was 26 back then and was unemployed.
As one of the requirements, she had to prove that the children were all hers, and so they took the DNA test.
When the social services asked her to meet them, she thought it was just another step within the bureaucracy. Suddenly, she found herself in the middle of a criminal investigation.
“As I sat down, they came up and shut the door, and they just went back and just started drilling me with questions like, ‘Who are you?'” Fairchild told the news outlet.
She kept insisting that the kids were hers, but the evidence mounted against her was indisputable.
It was like living in a surreal nightmare. Social services said that they could take her kids anytime – but she knew they were her children!
She gave birth to them. She even has pictures of them growing up in her arms.
At one point, she called her obstetrician, Dr. Dreisbach who was there through all of her births. He promised to testify for her in court, but the problem was that no lawyer was willing to take her case. Especially when other DNA tests for the case returned the same result.
That’s when a mother across the country stepped up with some interesting information.
In Boston, Karen Keegan needed a kidney transplant. Hoping that one of her sons might be a match, they underwent DNA testing. What she thought was a routine check resulted in chilling and surreal news.
None of her children matched her DNA and it baffled the doctors attending to her.
She underwent various tests where they extracted DNA all over her body.
One part of her, in particular, provided the key.
The DNA in her thyroid nodule matched her kids.
A part of her proved that she is connected to her children. But how?
Fairchild and Keegan, in a way, were their own twins.
It’s a medical phenomenon called “chimerism.”
When two eggs are fertilized, there are times when one of them absorbs the other. And even if the eggs are fused, the resulting union still possessed two genetic codes.
Fairchild’s lawyer, Attorney Tindell, read about the case in the New England Journal of Medicine. He then asked the court to give them time so Fairchild could go through the same tests.
Soon enough, they proved that Fairchild was their biological mother.
Different women, same story. And it all made the difference.
“I probably wouldn’t have my kids today if they didn’t discover her situation. They wouldn’t have known to even consider me as a chimera,” Fairchild added.
They may have solved the case of Fairchild, but as for chimerism, it’s still a question that needed answers.
Hear the unbelievable story in the video below.
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