she remained pregnant for 36 years!

A 60-year-old Indian woman is one of the rare women – only more than 300 cases described in all scientific literature – to have carried a “stone child.” » Her story begins at Lata Mangeshkar Hospital in Nagpur, Maharashtra, where she goes for abdominal pain that has persisted for two months. What worries him most is the presence of a massmass at the level of his navel. The doctors examine him carefully. The mass is quite imposing, no mobilemobile and hard to palpation. The scanner allows us to better understand its size: 11 by 8 centimeters. The examination reveals something else more surprising: bones that have no place in this part of the body.

Pregnant for 36 years

The doctors then have an intuition, reinforced by questioning the patient. Coming from a rural and disadvantaged background, she became pregnant in 1978, 36 years before her visit to the hospital in 2014. At the time, she went to the hospital to monitor her pregnancy, but was told that the fetus is not viable and must be removed during an operation. Frightened by this idea, the patient returns to her village without being treated. Since then, she has experienced intermittent abdominal pain, and was treated by a doctor with painkillers. Until she went to the hospital in Nagpur, unable to take it anymore.

Faced with these elements, doctors suspect that she doordoor her baby dead 36 years ago, of whom only the bones remain. An extremely rare phenomenon which only concerns 0.0054% of pregnancies and 1.5 to 1.8% of abdominal pregnancies nicknamed “children of stone” or “lithopedion” for specialists. On August 14, 2014, doctors extracted the small, almost intact skeleton of the fetus from his abdomen.

Lithopedions, strange and rare ectopic pregnancies

The lithopedion is the result of the fixation and development of theovumovum fertilized in the peritoneal cavity rather than in theuterusuterus. In a second case, the fertilized egg can hang in the uterus but following a problem, it detaches and continues its development in the peritoneal cavity. It is a form of ectopic pregnancyectopic pregnancy, the fetus is not viable and its presence endangers the life of the person concerned. In the case of a lithopedion, the fetus survives until the age of three months. If the mother’s body does not absorb it, it becomes surrounded by a substance limestonelimestone which gives it a mummified appearance. In our case, it is a so-called “skeletonized” lithopedion because all the soft tissues of the fetus have disappeared, only the bones are still there.

There are only about 300 cases of lithopedion in the scientific literature, but their existence has been known since ancient times. The oldest case of a “stone child” dates from -1,100 BC, it was discovered during archaeological excavations carried out in a chasmchasm, in Kerr County, Texas. Another case was exhumed in Costabelle in the south of France, it dates from the IV^e century AD