30 year old fetus

Robert

Stay Frosty!
Jan 2, 1999
20,574
341
83
dr1.com
We covered this in the Daily News the other day.

A rare medical case indeed
In a story carried by almost all of today's newspapers, a 65-year old Haitian woman was found to have been carrying a dead fetus for 30 years, becoming the first case of this type in the country and only the fourth in the world, according to the specialists who treated her at the Luis Eduardo Aybar Hospital. This was an ectopic pregnancy that became petrified in a condition that medical literature calls lithopedion (a fetus that has become calcified outside the uterus). Lusianni Isa lives in a Haitian town near Jimani on the border and except for stomach pains that she took care of with "plants from the earth and pills" she showed no symptoms.

About nine months ago her son Licien Saint Naurant brought her to live with him in a village near La Victoria. Last Saturday, he took her to the emergency room of the Luis Eduardo Aybar Hospital suffering from stomach pains. An x-ray revealed the existence of a fetal mass weighing more than three pounds. The membrane containing the fetus was removed by a C-section, performed by a medical team headed by Dr. Albert Basa and Liladys Roman.
 

jrjrth

Bronze
Mar 24, 2011
782
1
0
This is from 1957

I thought I heard of this before it was a Stone Baby from 1957...
For more than half her 67 years the woman patient at Chicago's Holy Cross Hospital had enjoyed excellent health, had never needed surgery. Now, as doctors tried to diagnose Mrs. W.'s recent stomach complaint, her husband recalled that 37 years before, while washing dishes, she had been seized with cramps and collapsed on the floor. A physician had called it intestinal flu and put her to bed. For almost two weeks she had been very ill, sometimes in a coma, and had to be forcibly fed, but then she made a fine recovery, raised her one son to manhood.

Holy Cross doctors took X rays which indicated stomach cancer, and incidentally showed a stonelike mass, 6 in. long, in the abdomen. Dr. Edward J. Krol and colleagues decided to remove it. The object, they report in the Illinois Medical Journal, was a lithopedion (stone child), a petrified fetus of three to four months' gestation. The doctors' conclusion: what had troubled Mrs. W. 37 years ago was not the flu but an ectopic pregnancy, in which the fertilized ovum had lodged in one of the Fallopian tubes. As the fetus grew, it burst the tube and escaped into the abdominal cavity. This explained the seizure during dishwashing. Gradually the fetus had become completely calcined.

Although lithopedia have been known since 1557, this is only the 259th fully authenticated case. In the case of Mrs. W., her death a year and a half after the operation was caused by cancer, had nothing to do with her stone child.



Read more: Medicine: Stone Baby - TIME