I Love Chile Weekly Magazine | Page 7

NATIONAL NEWS RARE PREGNANCY DISCOVERED IN 92 YEAR OLD CHILEAN WOMAN By EMALYDIA FLENORY A 92-YEAR-OLD CHILEAN GRANDMOTHER HAS RECENTLY DISCOVERED THAT SHE HAS BEEN PREGNANT FOR THE PAST 50 YEARS OF HER LIFE. CHILE — The discovery was made during a hip x-ray after the woman went into the hospital following a fall. To everyone’s surprise, the x-ray showed that she was carrying a mummified fetus which had been seven months developed. Although the fetus was seven months developed, the woman never sensed any pain during the pregnancy or in the past 50 years that she was carrying the fetus. However, this grandmother is not the first reported case of bearing a mummified child. In 1582, an autopsy was performed on a 68-year-old woman in France. During the examination, Dr. Jean d’Ailleboust discovered that this woman had been carrying a mummified child for 28 years. This condition was later named lithopaedion or stone-child. According to Radiopaedia.org, lithopaedion occurs if a dead fetus is too large to be re-absorbed into the mother’s body and because of this, becomes a foreign body to the mother’s immune system. To protect the body from any infection from this foreign body, the mother’s body will coat the fetus in a calciferous substance. Overtime, this substance will cause the fetus to become mummified—like stone. Lithopaedion can occur anywhere from 14 weeks to full-term. One in 11,000 pregnancies can result in lithopaedion, and because it is so rare, it is likely to go undiagnosed. According to HuffingtonPost, Dr. Natalie Burger, an endocrinologist and fertility specialist in Texas, told NBC News that lithopaedions start as ectopic pregnancies, which is a condition where the fertilized egg gets trapped on its way to the womb and begins to develop outside of the uterus instead. “Usually an ectopic pregnancy will mean a [fallopian] tubal pregnancy, but in a small percentage of cases, the pregnancy can actually occur in the abdominal cavity — in places like the bowel, the ovary, or even on the aorta,” Burger said. “These are very rare locations and they can be very dangerous.”