38-year-old skeleton of a baby removed from woman’s body

38-year-old skeleton of a baby removed from woman’s body

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.

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.

Be social, please share!

Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *