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Suze Lopez holds her baby in her arms and marvels at the unique way he came into the world.
Before little Ryu was born, he was developing outside his mother’s womb, hidden by a basketball-sized ovarian cyst — a dangerous condition so rare that his doctors planned to write about the case for a medical journal.
Only about 1 in 30,000 pregnancies occur in the abdomen rather than in the uterus, and those that reach full term are “essentially unheard of — less than 1 in a million,” said Dr. John Ozimek, medical director of labor and delivery at Cedars-Sinai. los angeles Where Ryu was born. “I mean, it’s really crazy.”
Lopez, a 41-year-old nurse who lives bakersfield, CaliforniaShe did not know she was pregnant with her second child until a few days before giving birth.
When her belly started growing earlier this year, she thought it was her ovarian cyst getting bigger. Doctors had been monitoring the mass since she was in her 20s, after removing her right ovary and another cyst that was left in place.
Lopez didn’t experience any of the common pregnancy symptoms, like morning nausea, and never felt the kicks. Although she has not menstruated, her cycles are irregular and she sometimes goes years without menstruating.
For months, she and her husband Andrew Lopez went about their lives and traveled abroad.
But gradually, the pain and pressure in her stomach became worse, and Lopez thought it was finally time to have the 22-pound cyst removed. she needed one CT scanWhich previously required a pregnancy test due to radiation exposure. He was very surprised when the test came back positive.
Lopez shared the news with her husband at a Dodgers baseball game in August, handing him a package with a note and a onesie.
He recalled, “I just looked at her face and she just looked like she wanted to cry, smile and cry at the same time.”
Shortly after the game, López began feeling unwell and sought help from Cedars-Sinai. It was discovered that he had dangerously high blood pressure, which the medical team stabilized. They also did blood tests and did an ultrasound and MRIThe scan found that her uterus was empty, but an almost fully grown fetus in an amniotic sac was hidden in a small space in her abdomen, near her liver,
“It didn’t look like it was directly attacking any organ,” Ozimek said. “It looked like it was implanted mostly in the side of the pelvis, which is also very dangerous but more manageable than being implanted in the liver.”
Dr. Cara Heuser, a maternal-fetal specialist in Utah who is not connected to the case, said almost all pregnancies that implant outside the uterus — called ectopic pregnancies — rupture and cause bleeding if not removed. Typically, these occur in the fallopian tubes.
A 2023 medical journal article from doctors in Ethiopia described another abdominal pregnancy in which mother and baby survived, stating that fetal mortality in such cases can be as high as 90% and birth defects are seen in approximately 1 in 5 surviving infants.
But Lopez and her son overcame all obstacles.
On August 18, a medical team delivered the 8-pound (3.6 kg) baby while she was under full anesthesia, with the cyst removed during the same surgery. He lost almost all of his blood, Ozimek said, but the team controlled the bleeding and gave him a blood transfusion.
The doctors kept telling her husband what was happening.
“The whole time, I may have looked calm on the outside, but on the inside I was doing nothing but praying,” Andrew Lopez said. “It was something that scared me so much that I died, knowing that at any moment I could lose my wife or my child.”
Instead, they both recovered.
“It was really, really remarkable,” Ozimek said.
Since then, Ryu – named after a baseball player and a character from the Street Fighter video game series – has been healthy and thriving. Her parents love watching her interact with her 18-year-old sister, Kaila, and say she completes their family.
As Ryu’s first Christmas approaches, Lopez describes feeling extremely blessed.
“I believe in miracles,” she said, looking at her baby. “God gave us this gift – the best gift ever.”
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. AP is solely responsible for all content.