[The title
was written by my editor.]
Elderly woman in India sought medical attention for abdominal pain, and
the cause turned out to be the 38-year-old skeleton of a baby from a record-old
ectopic pregnancy.
by John
Tyburski
Copyright © Daily
Digest News, KPR Media, LLC. All rights reserved.
Nine
months is long enough for most women to carry their babies. For Jyoti Kumar of
Nagpur, India, 38 years was a bit too long. The 62-year-old woman was recently
discovered to be still carrying the remains of an ectopic pregnancy from 38
years prior.
Kumar had
the ectopic pregnancy when she was 24 and was informed that the baby would die.
An ectopic pregnancy is a pregnancy in which the fertilized egg implants
outside of the uterus. A fetus may still grow and develop for some time.
For Kumar,
the prospect of surgery to have the fetus removed was too frightening. She
eventually knew that the baby died but left the hospital in which she was seen
and sought treatment for abdominal pain at a small clinic.
Decades
later, Kumar’s abdominal pain flared up, and she allowed doctors to remove the skeleton
of the deceased fetus, which over time had become encapsulated in a calcified
sac within her abdomen.
“We found
a lump on the lower right side of her abdomen, and feared it was cancer. A CT
scan then revealed that the lump was made of hard, calcified matter,” said one
of her doctors. “But it was only after the patient underwent an MRI that we
could make out that the mass was in fact a child’s skeleton.
Doctors
explained that the amniotic fluid and soft tissues of the fetus were probably
dissolved and reabsorbed shortly after the fetus died, leaving only a bag of
bones in a small volume of fluid. They believe it to be the longest ectopic
pregnancy on record to date. The longest known case was in a Belgian woman who
had remains taken out some 18 years after the fetus died.
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