An elderly woman complaining of belly pain was found to have a mummified foetus inside her.
Medics were astonished to discover the unnamed 84-year-old from Durango, Mexico, had been carrying the unborn foetus for 40 years.
She attended the public health clinic due to the pain in her abdomen, with the storying having been reported by multiple local outlets – although the Mexican Social Security Institute is yet to confirm it.
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Now medical experts believe the foetus has been calcified, in a rare event called lithopaedion, which is extraordinarily rare.
The heartbreaking circumstances arise during abdominal pregnancy when an unborn foetus dies inside the mother but reaches a point where it has become too large to be reabsorbed by her body and as such remains in place.
An abdominal pregnancy is an extremely rare form of ectopic pregnancy that sees the gestation implant outside of the mother’s reproductive organs and instead in the abdomen.
The outside of the foetus’s body calcifies as part of the mother’s body's bid to protect itself, part of a foreign body reaction to shield the mum from the dead tissue and from getting an infection.
Medics reckon that the baby died and mummified in the 40th week of the pregnancy after not developing normally.
Reports claim it is unlikely the mother received proper prenatal care when the baby was conceived some 40 years ago.
Astonishingly, the mummified foetus sitting inside the woman all this time is believed to have not caused her any health problems.
So rare is her situation that only around 300 cases of lithopaedia have ever been recorded.
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