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An 81-year-old woman has died after doctors found an extremely rare “petrified baby” in her stomach that she had been carrying for more than five decades.
Daniela Almeida Vera, a mother of seven children, was rushed to surgery after this shocking discovery, one of fewer than 300 cases ever recorded.
Using CT scans, doctors found the “fossilized fetus,” or as it is also known as the “calcified fetus” (lithopedion), which had been present in his mother’s body for 56 years.
The “petrified baby” is known as a rare phenomenon that occurs beginning at 14 weeks of pregnancy, when the fetus dies during abdominal pregnancy, and is too large to be reabsorbed by the body, and thus calcifies from the outside as part of a strange reaction that protects the mother’s body from the dead tissue of the fetus and prevents Infection.
According to what doctors said, Daniela, an indigenous woman living in a settlement near Brazil’s border with Paraguay, has been carrying the child since her last pregnancy in 1968.
The medical staff suspected she had cancer before discovering this rare condition, after she complained of stomach pain.
Daniela was rushed to undergo surgery in Brazil to remove the fetus. She underwent surgery on March 14, and died the next day in intensive care.
The rare “petrified child” was sent for medical tests.
Her daughter, Roselie, told the local press: “She did not like going to the doctor and was afraid of the equipment used to conduct the tests. She did not want to go to the doctors because she was worried that she would have a tumor. She would only take medicine until the pain went away.”
Daniella first went to a small hospital near her home to get help after her pain was diagnosed as a urinary tract infection.
She was then rushed to a hospital in southern Brazil where further tests could be done.
About a year before Daniela’s death, a 50-year-old Congolese woman died as a result of a similar surgery on a “fossilized fetus” that she had been carrying for nine years.
Source: The Sun