This 91 Year Old Woman Carried A Fetus For 60 Years

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A 91-year old Chilean woman learned this year that she had carried a 4.4 pound calcified fetus for over 60 years – the discovery finally putting an end to her lifelong question of why her husband and her could never have a child. The discovery occurred by accident when Estela Meléndez fell and doctors took x-rays.

Yahoo! News explains:

“The doctor said I had a tumor and that they needed to operate on me,” she tells CNN. But a second X-ray confirmed that the mass was actually a calcified fetus, which is rare but certainly not without precedent. It’s called “lithopedion,” and is first described in the 10th century, reports the Washington Post.

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Calcification typically occurs when a fetus grows outside the uterus and is thus not viable; if small enough, the mother’s body simply reabsorbs the dead tissue, but if large enough, the fetus is surgically removed—or if not removed, as in Meléndez’s case, it can calcify, thereby protecting the mother from infection. But because this baby had actually formed inside Meléndez’s uterus, it likely prevented her from being able to get pregnant again.

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“We suffered tremendously because of this reason,” she says; her husband recently died after 74 years of marriage and the couple spent years trying to conceive. Meléndez, meanwhile, will not have the fetus removed because doctors have deemed the surgery riskier than leaving the woman’s body alone.