14 DAY TRIAL // Doctors at the NKP Salve Institute of Medical Sciences in India believe they have uncovered the longest ectopic pregnancy in the world ever, after a 62-year-old woman walked in complaining of abdominal pains, problems urinating and fever, and they discovered the skeleton of a 38-year-old fetus inside.
Kantabai Thakre became pregnant when she was 24 years old but was informed that the pregnancy was an ectopic one, which is to say the fertilized egg had not attached itself to the lining of the uterus, but elsewhere.
She was told that the pregnancy could not be carried to term and that she would have to have surgery to remove the fetus, the Daily Mail informs. She was so scared of going under the knife that she walked out of the clinic, sought treatment for the pains she was suffering elsewhere, and just hoped everything would go away without the need for surgery.
When the pains subsided, she assumed that this was exactly what had happened.
The pains reappeared now, after all these years. When she went to the aforementioned Institute with her health problems, she didn’t even connect the two incidents. Doctors felt a lump on the side of her stomach and initially assumed she had a cancerous tumor.
“She was complaining of consistent pain in her abdomen and she had urinary problems with high fever,” Dr. Murtaza Akhtar, head of surgery at the hospital, says for the Mail. “Then we found a lump on her right side but we feared it was cancer. After she went for an MRI and CT scan we could make out that it was actually a matured skeleton encapsulated in a calcified sac.”
Asked if she ever had a pregnancy that she did not carry to term, the woman admitted that she was with child in 1978, saying that the child had died. Dr. Akhtar believes hers is the world’s longest ectopic pregnancy recorded.
Dr. Mohammad Yunus Shah concurs. “We believe this could be the longest case on record at 38 years. We asked for a detailed medical history and all we could get was that the patient's brother told us that in 1978 she was pregnant and had some complications,” he says for the same media outlet.
Doctors removed the baby skeleton piece by piece, but the task wasn't easy as it had become stuck to the woman's internal organs.
Earlier this year, an 84-year-old woman from Brazil had to have surgery to remove the calcified remains of a 44-year-old fetus inside, but hers hadn’t been an ectopic pregnancy: she had tried to have the baby aborted with the help of a witch doctor. She killed the fetus, but it was not eliminated from her body, and in time, it turned into a baby-shaped stone inside her belly.