An elderly woman who was recently admitted to a Columbian hospital after suffering from severe stomach pains found out the problem was much stranger than some bad takeout.
At first the doctor thought the 82-year-old woman was suffering from gastro-enteritis (a contagious diarrheal condition), NTD Television reported.
Upon closer examination, doctors concluded the source of the pain was from a fetus that had been sitting in the woman's abdomen for 40 years.
"An 82-year-old patient who arrived at emergency services on December 8 with diarrhea and in the medical exam the medic who was looking over (the patient) noted something abnormal in her abdomen and ordered an exam thinking that perhaps it was gallstones. An ultrasound was done and it wasn't positive. Then, an abdominal radiography was ordered which located a tumor in the abdominal cavity which concluded that it was a fetus in the woman's abdomen," Dr. Kemer Ramirez, a doctor at Bogota's Tunjuelito Hospital told NTD.
The phenomenon, called lithopedion or "stone-child syndrome," occurred because the fetus started to develop in the abdomen as opposed to the uterus.
"This happens because the fetus does not develop in the uterus because it has moved to another place. In this case, the abdominal part of the woman is not a viable [place] and this is what happened, a calcified fetus because the body is generating defense mechanisms and it is calcified until it stays there encapsulated," Ramirez said.
This is by far not the first case lithopedion seen by medical experts, but the condition is extremely rare. One in every 11,000 fetuses will develop abdominally; out of this number only around 1.5 percent will develop into lithopedion.
The first lithopedion case was seen as far back as the year 1582. An autopsy of a 68-year-old woman showed she had carried a "stone child" for 28 years, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine reported.
WATCH:
