50 YEARS OF PREGNANCY

This story might sound unbelievable to you, but it is true!!

 

In less than 300 cases like these have been noted in the last 400 years of medical literature.In the year 1955 in a small village outside Casablanca a young girl, Zahra Aboutalib went into labour. Forty-eight hours later of agonising labour pain, the baby was still unborn, so the young Zahra was rushed to the hospital. However, after watching a young woman die with labour pain on the operating table, Zahra fled the hospital in panic, convinced she would suffer the same fate.

Days of excruciating pain followed after than and then the pains suddenly stopped. The young Zahra, believed in the local myth of the ‘sleeping baby', so put the pregnancy out of her mind. This made her believe that baby would be born at a later date. However, the time of her delivery never happened and many decade passed where in which Zahra adopted three children and became a grandmother at the age of 75. 

 

The misery never stopped there. Her pains returned! There were several doctors who could not explain the reason for these uncanny pains. But there was one doctor who felt that Zahra's swollen stomach indicated an ovarian tumour where on the result of the scan was quite shocking! The mass inside Zahra's stomach was a calcified baby. Unable to be born, the baby had developed outside the womb and fused with Zahra's internal organs, which had died. The specific term for this case is called 'Lithopedion' which is better known as a stone baby. This rare phenomenon occurs mostly when a fetus dies during an abdominal pregnancy where it is too large to be reabsorbed by the body, and calcifies on the outside, shielding the mother's body from the dead tissue of the baby and thus preventing infection. 

 

The baby to protect itself from infection from this foreign body, the baby's body developed a layer of hard calcified material around it where it hardened over the years. The operation which was successful to remove the calcified foetus was a tricky one. The reason being that it was a delicate surgery since over the decades it had fused with both Zahra's abdominal wall and the internal organs. Sources say that this situation being so dangerous could have led to the death of Zahra along with the child because it would have caused massive internal bleeding killing both of them. But she was lucky. There are around 300 cases of this specific syndrome reported, but Zahra's calcified baby spent the longest time in the womb. Zahra who gave birth nearly 50 years later was known to have given birth to a 'mummy baby'.