The 46 year pregnancy.

[blueteddy]

75 year old women gives birth to a baby weighing a stone, 46 years after it was conceived!
How bizarre!!!
Ch 5 - now!

[NomDePlume]

wtf ? IVF ? Frozen embryo ? Do they last that long ?


(In a room where I can't watch ch5)

[helsi]

urghhh!! How strange. Poor woman. Not watching but is it in a third world coountry by any chance?

[NomDePlume]

Just flicked it on in the other room. She was preg in 1955, got to 9 months and went into what she thought was labour. It wasn't, the pains were due to the distress her baby was in as it's oxygen supply was cut off. The baby died and for some reason, they didn't remove it (not seen an explaination why though). Basically the foetus is a 46 yr old corpse

[spacecadet]

i read about this, she went into labour but it never progressed, they wanted to give her a c-section but she ran from the hospital, poor women, turned out the baby was ectopic.

[7up]

blimey, hows she gona survive that!

[blueteddy]

The baby turned to stone!!!

[7up]

bad isnt it, i dont wana watch the old girl have it removed incase she dies. poor thing

[Eve2005]

ouch, they did an episode where something like this happened in nip/tuck recently. dont have ch5 to look for myself

[7up]

it was calcified. gross, took 4 hours to remove, a rock hard blob fetus, weighed 7lbs, im turning over now!

[blueteddy]

She survived the op!

[7up]

yea she did didnt she, she looks really upset tho, poor woman

[greyriver]

grooooooccce.....they have cut the baby in half

[Hulababy]

How terrible the the woman!

[blueteddy]

Ewwwwwwwww! It is all a bit weird isn't it?

[spacecadet]

its very sad really, if she had the c-section at the time, they might have saved it, although admittedly medical science wasnt so advanced and being ectopic the mother and the baby may have both died.

[Eve2005]

how did an ectopic preg get to 9 months? surely the pain of that was worse than the c-section would have been?

[spacecadet]

it has happened before, beleive it or not.

[Hulababy]

This is the woman's story:

In 1955, in a small village outside Casablanca, Zahra Aboutalib went into labour. Forty-eight hours later, the baby still hadn’t shifted and Zahra was rushed to hospital. There, Zahra looked on as a young woman died in agony on the operating table. There was only one thing for it; she turned and fled in panic, convinced she would suffer the same fate. Days of excruciating pain followed, and then the pains faded out. In Moroccan culture, it is believed that babies can live inside a woman’s womb to protect her honour and Zahra took on this “sleeping baby” myth. Zahra cast the pregnancy from her mind and many decades passed, during which time she adopted three children and became a grandmother.

Then one day when Zahra was 75 the agonising pains returned with a vengeance. Dr Taibi Quazzani assumed Zahra’s swollen stomach indicated an ovarian tumour and sent her for scans. Nothing could have prepared Zahra for the results: the mass inside her stomach was no less than a calcified baby. All those years ago, the baby had developed outside the womb and fused with Zahra’s internal organs, and unable to be born, had died. To shield itself from infection from this “foreign body”, the body developed a layer of hard calcified material around the dead baby. Zahra’s foetus had developed in her fallopian tubes as an ectopic pregnancy and she had been carrying a miniature mummy inside her for 46 years. Most ectopic pregnancies end in miscarriage or a termination, as they are the leading cause of pregnancy-related deaths, but Zahra’s baby had defied all odds and although dead, it had been accepted as just another organ.

The operation to remove the calcified foetus was a risky one. Over the decades it had fused with Zahra’s abdominal wall and internal organs. How Zahra had managed to survive these years is anybody’s guess, but she was lucky once more and got through the operation. She had even been lucky to run from the hospital. Without the required scanning technology, the doctors responsible for Zahra’s baby would have opened her up for a Caesarian section unaware of the baby’s positioning, and would probably have cut through the umbilical cord, killing both Zahra and her baby.

There are around 300 cases like this reported, but Zahra’s calcified baby spent the longest time in the womb.

[Eve2005]

god i hate having crappy channels!

[Eve2005]

crossed posts hulababy, amazing she survived.

[blueteddy]

Absolutely amazing!

[Tutter]

The other lady's case was amazing - she delivered triplets, one of whom had developed ectopically. Hard to watch - to know that a baby can survive an ectopic pregnancy - even though it's rare. I had an ep, and my life was chosen over that of my baby. Have been thinking since then that maybe my baby would have stood a chance too

[LeahE]

Tutter -- if your baby was in the fallopian tube then he/she wouldn't have stood a chance. AFAIK all of the (extremely rare) cases where an ectopic has survived to full term have been where the embryo implanted somewhere else in the abdominal cavity. Obviously I don't know where yours was but fallopian tube is most common.

[Tutter]

The baby of the lady concerned survived despite growing in the fallopian tube. The tube ruptured (this is the point at which most foetuses die) but the baby survived because its placenta attached to her body outside the uterus. Yes, this is extremely rare, but it's not all that rare for babies' hearts to be beating at the time of ep surgery - this is one of the heartbreaking things for women who've suffered ep.