Lydia Fairchild

From Freepedia

Lydia Fairchild is the mother of 4 children.

After DNA testing showed that her children were not hers, Lydia was astonished and brought her case to court.

Lydia's lawyer then heard about another similar case: the other woman's name was Karen Keegan and she needed a kidney transplant. Her three sons offered to be donors, but during the DNA testing required for the possible donation from one of her sons, results showed that Karen was not the mother of two of her sons.

Later, testing showed that Karen was a chimera, a combination of 2 separate DNA strands. This happens when 2 eggs are fertilized in the womb and instead of forming twins the cells merge and begin to form one fetus with 2 sets of genetic information. In basic terms they are their own twin. In Karen and Lydia's cases there were 2 sets of female DNA, if it had been one male/one female, they would have been born with hermaphrodite characteristics. The DNA that matched Karen's 2 sons was found in her thyroid and hair samples.

Lydia got new hope, and asked for testing. Doctors found out that she, too, was a chimera after they tested a cervical smear. For some, their chimerism shows up in each tissue, but one set of DNA is more dominant than the other, and vice versa for a different set of tissue. For others, there is the possibility that they are only chimeric in one tissue, such as the reproductive organs.