Imagine the surprise of a Colombian woman who, at the ripe age of 82, discovered she'd been unknowingly carrying a calcified fetus around inside her for the past 40 years! No, I didn't know that was possible, either.
According to an
article in the Huffington Post, the octogenarian took her stomach pains to the hospital, only for an X-ray to reveal the cause of her discomfort: a 'stone baby,' or lithopaedian, had grown inside her abdomen instead of her uterus.
The phenomenon of lithopaedian is pretty rare, affecting one in every 11,000 pregnancies, and developing into a lithopaedian in only 1.5 percent to 1.8 percent of these pregnancies. Imagine an
ectopic pregnancy, but instead of developing in the fallopian tubes, the fetus grows a different cavity within the body, like in the stomach or the bowel.
Amazingly, in such cases as the fetus mummifies, a layer of calcium covers it, thereby protecting the mother "from the dead tissue of the baby."
Now the Colombian woman has to have the fetus surgically removed. Another case, involving a 92-year-old Chinese woman, wasn't so lucky. In 2009, she delivered the stone baby she'd been carrying for half a century.
Shudder.
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