An 84 year-old woman in Brazil has been carrying a dead fetus inside her for over four decades and did not know it until recently.
She found out only after she went to the hospital in Natividade, Tocantins, complaining of stomach pains. She underwent x-ray examination and Instead of finding stomach bugs, doctors found the calcified remains of a fetus that has been dead for 44 years. Doctors said the fetus died when it was between 20 and 28 weeks old. The fetus' face and bones were visible in the images.
After the initial startling discovery, the patient was transferred to Porto Nacional Hospital near Palmas for further tests.
The 84 year-old patient told her doctors that she got pregnant more than 40 years ago, but she kept experiencing extreme pains in her abdomen, so she went to a witch doctor in her village, who gave her a concoction that was supposed to ease her pain after she drank it. She followed the instructions she was given, and after she drank the potion, her pains went away, and she assumed that the pregnancy was already aborted.
In reality, the fetus did die, but it was never expelled from her body, and over time, her body coated the dead fetus with calcium deposits, which is one of the body's natural instincts that helps prevent itself from being harmed by a fetal corpse.
'Her stomach didn't grow any more, the baby stopped moving and she thought it had been aborted,' said Gesneria Saraiva Kratka, gynaecologist at the Porto Nacional hospital.
The doctors diagnosed the condition as lithopedion, or in which a fetus dies during an abdominal pregnancy and eventually calcifies over time because it is too large to be reabsorbed into the body. The calcified unborn baby caused by lithopedion is called a 'stone baby.'
Naturally, the fetus now has to be removed, but the patient has refused to give her doctors the consent to do so, for reasons that she did not disclose.
This is not the first time that a stone baby was discovered. Just last December, an 82 year-old woman from Bogota was diagnosed with the condition, and it was found that she had been carrying her stone baby for 40 years. In 2009, a 92 year-old Chinese woman was found to have been carrying a stone baby for about 60 years.
The first reported case of a stone baby was in 1582, where a 68 year-old Madame Colombe Chatri of France was autopsied, and the coroners found a fully-developed stone baby in her abdomen. The stone baby was estimated to have been in her for 28 years.
