It sounds like something from a sci-fi movie, and that’s probably what doctors thought when they made a startling discovery in a 73-year-old patient’s abdomen.
According to Dr Karan Raj, the woman was rushed to the emergency room in Algeria after complaining of intense abdominal pain.
The story which was first reported several years ago, recently went viral once again for the mere fact that when looking at scans to diagnose her ailment, doctors found a “baby made of stone” in one of her fallopian tubes.
Sharing the discovery on on his TikTok account, Raj explained, “This is when a foetus dies during an abdominal ectopic pregnancy.”
What baffled the medical experts even more is that she managed to live a normal life for 35 years with the foetus still intact.
According to Al Arabiya, the woman had received medical treatment but the unborn baby remained undiscovered until 2016.
“Most of the time people find these and [sometimes] even after they're found and don't do anything about it because they're totally asymptomatic,” Dr Kim Garcsi, from the University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland, told ABC News.
The rare condition called lithopedion occurs when the foetus dies during pregnancy and is too large to be absorbed by the body.
Calcification happens to protect the mother from infection, the US National Library of Medicine explained.
According to the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, only 290 cases of lithopedion have been documented.
IOL Lifestyle