A woman in her eighties surprised paramedics when they discovered that the abdominal pain she was complaining about was nothing but a mummified fetus in her womb more than four decades ago.
The Daily Star, which reported the story, said an 84-year-old woman from Durango, Mexico, who was not named in the medical documents, was carrying an unborn fetus for 40 years.
The woman had gone to the public health clinic because of pain in her abdomen, to find out its causes, which prompted many local websites to circulate the story, and medical experts now believe that the fetus has been calcified, in an extremely rare event called “fossilized or calcified fetus.”
The heartbreaking circumstances of this rare condition arise when the fetus dies during pregnancy in the abdomen, is too large for the body to reabsorb, and calcifies from the outside as part of a foreign body reaction, protecting the mother’s body from the dead tissue of the fetus and protecting it from infection.
Medics believe the baby died and mummified in the 40th week of pregnancy after it stopped growing normally.
The reports added that it is unlikely that the mother would have received proper care during pregnancy some 40 years ago.
Surprisingly, the mummified fetus that sat inside the woman all this time did not cause her any health problems. The newspaper did not mention the exact size of the fetus, noting that only about 300 cases of lithopaedia were recorded worldwide.
2023-08-23 15:51:51
#fetus #mothers #womb #years
