A medical team in Skikda, eastern Algeria, found a 73-year-old woman carrying a petrified child in her stomach for 35 years.
Until she began experiencing unusual pain in her body, the elderly woman had a perfectly normal life.
After doctors did the symptomatic procedures, they found out what was not expected.
The X-ray revealed a strange body in the old lady’s belly, not her womb. The mother had carried a 2 kilo, 7-month-old petrified fetus for 35 years.
Her quality of life was unaffected by the petrified fetus she carried back in 1981.
Despite the fact that the elderly mother had previously had medical treatment, doctors were unable to detect the unborn child.
When a pregnancy develops in the abdomen rather than the uterus, it is called a lithopedion.
There is no method for the body to evacuate the fetus if the pregnancy fails, which usually happens because the fetus does not have enough blood supply.
As a result, the body uses the same immune system that protects against any foreign object discovered in a person’s system to calcify the fetus, turning it into ‘stone’.
Calcification of the tissue protects the mother from infection, according to Dr. Kim Garcsi of University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland.
However, this means that the ‘stone’ baby can remain unnoticed in the abdomen for decades.
“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 Garcsi told ABC News.
Only 290 cases of lithopedion have ever been described in medical literature, according to a 1996 paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.
Image Credit: Reddit
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