Indian doctors believe they discovered the longest ectopic pregnancy in the world after removing the skeleton of a baby from a woman, which had been in her for nearly four decades.
Jyoti Kumar from Madhya Pradesh state in central India became pregnant at the age of 24 in 1978. Then the doctors warned the mother-to-be that her child had little chance of survival, as the fetus began to grow outside of her womb.
Horrified at the thought of an operation, the woman ran away and turned to a small clinic for help, where she was helped to cope with the pain. A few months later, when the pain subsided, Kumar was convinced that the problem had resolved itself.
But 38 years later, the woman began to experience constant abdominal pain, and therefore decided to visit a clinic at the Institute of Medical Sciences in the central Indian city of Nagpur. There, a team of surgeons, including Dr. Mohammad Yunus-Shah, performed an operation to remove the skeleton of her child who died many years ago.
“The woman said that the pain appeared several months ago and has not disappeared since then. After examining her, we found a lump on the lower right side of her abdomen and were afraid that it was cancer,”Yunus-Shah said.
The presence of a tumor was confirmed by ultrasound. The CT scan then showed that the neoplasm consisted of tough calcified tissue. It was only after an MRI that it was possible to find out that the incomprehensible lump is actually the skeleton of a child.
With this amazing discovery, doctors revisited the medical literature for similar cases. As a result, they found out that a similar thing happened to a Belgian woman who kept the remnants of an ectopic pregnancy for 18 years.
Promotional video:
The team of surgeons discovered a tumor containing a mature skeleton encapsulated in a calcified sac. The tumor was found between the uterus, intestines, and bladder.
“The amniotic fluid that protects the fetus may have been absorbed by the soft tissues, leaving only a sac of bones and a small amount of fluid,” the British Internet publication Mail Online quoted the doctor as saying.