In one of the rarest medical cases, a 92 year-old Chilean woman was found to have a 50 year-old fetus still inside her abdominal cavity after being hospitalized for having fallen.
The condition that the woman suffers from is called "lithopedion," and it occurs when the fetus dies and the body is unable to expel the fetus on its own. After sometime, the fetus is calcified by the woman's body to protect itself, and eventually the fetus turns into stone.
The director of the hospital where the woman was taken to, Margo Vargas Lazo, told the BBC that a routine x-ray shows the fetus was at least 4.4 for pounds in size and took up almost her entire stomach cavity. According to reports, the fetus was about seven months developed when it had died inside the mother.
Lithopedion happens only 1.5 percent to 1.8 percent of all pregnancies and there have only been less than 300 cases documented, notes the Sao Paolo Medical Journal. Most of the women who have suffered from this type of pregnancy have been over the age of 40 and normally do not notice the presence of the fetus.
Lithopedion is not only restricted to women however, as there have been cases of boys giving birth to unborn, parasitic twins.
This is just the latest of lithopedion reports in as many years. In 2014, an 84 year-old Brazilian woman was hospitalized with complaints of stomach pains due to indigestion; after which the doctors found a 44 year-old fetus still inside her.
In this case, however, it turned out that the woman knew she had been pregnant but lost the baby after the fetus stopped. The mother did not allow doctors to remove the fetus.
Also in 2013, this time in Colombia, a woman was reported to have been carrying a 40-year-old fetus. The woman had been diagnosed with gastroenteritis, and an abdomen X-ray revealed the calcified fetus. The fetus was removed successfully.
The doctors involved in the latest case of the Chilean woman, however, did not remove the fetus from the mother due to her age. After the findings, she was promptly allowed to go home.