The astonishing story of a Colombian pensioner who went to the doctor for simple stomach pain and left with a diagnosis of a four-pound, decades-old, calcified fetus inside her abdomen.
The body is capable of extraordinary things—a fact rarely demonstrated more clearly than by the case of an 82-year-old woman in Bogotá, Colombia. When the elderly pensioner sought medical help for persistent stomach pain, doctors at Bogota’s Tunjuelito Hospital ordered a routine X-ray. What they saw on the film was not a common digestive issue, but a decades-old medical mystery: a four-pound, full-term fetus that had been carried inside her body for nearly forty years.
The shocking diagnosis given to the woman was a lithopedion—a phenomenon so rare it is often referred to simply as a “stone baby.” The case, which made headlines worldwide, is a potent reminder of the incredible and sometimes frightening ways the human body adapts to survive.
What is a Lithopedion?
The term “lithopedion” originates from the ancient Greek words lithos (stone) and paidion (child). It is an exceedingly rare consequence of an ectopic pregnancy, a situation where a fertilized egg implants and begins to develop outside the uterus. While most ectopic pregnancies occur in the fallopian tube, lithopedions develop when a fetus implants in the abdominal cavity.
If the fetus tragically passes away and is too large for the mother’s body to naturally reabsorb, the body launches an extraordinary, life-saving defensive manoeuvre. Because the dead fetal tissue is essentially a foreign body that could quickly lead to severe infection or fatal sepsis, the immune system must act immediately. Its solution is calcification.
The mother’s body slowly begins to deposit layers of calcium around the fetus, effectively encasing it in a protective, stone-like shell. This mummification process isolates the dead tissue, preventing it from decomposing and poisoning the mother’s system. It is a biological quarantine—a defense mechanism so effective that in this case, it protected the woman for four decades, allowing her to live a normal life with the calcified mass entirely undetected.
A Decades-Old Survival Mechanism
Medical experts emphasize that the lithopedion is a testament to the body’s resilience. Dr. Kim Garcsi from University Hospitals Case Medical Center once explained the process using a common analogy: “When you get old cartilage in the knee, it calcifies. The body uses the same process to stay healthy.”
Lithopedion is considered one of the rarest complications in medical science, occurring in only an estimated 1.5 to 1.8 percent of abdominal pregnancies, which themselves are rare, accounting for only 0.0054% of all pregnancies. This makes the Colombian woman’s case exceptionally unusual due to the sheer amount of time the fetus was retained. Cases have been documented where women carried a stone baby for over 60 years, with the average retention time being around 22 years. Many women, like the 82-year-old, remain completely asymptomatic, only discovering the condition much later in life, often incidentally during diagnostic imaging for another ailment.
For the Colombian pensioner, the only symptom was mild abdominal pain, a common complaint that nearly masked the remarkable truth. The X-ray clearly revealed the skeletal structure of the calcified mass. Weighing approximately four pounds, the fetus was large enough to cause occasional discomfort but was, thankfully, fully sealed off by the calcification process, saving her from life-threatening infection all those years.
The Outcome and Rarity
Following the discovery, the elderly woman was transferred to a specialised clinic in Bogota where the calcified fetus was successfully removed through surgery.
Today, thanks to advances in diagnostic tools like ultrasounds and improved prenatal care, ectopic pregnancies are usually detected and treated early. This early diagnosis means that the specific conditions required for a lithopedion to form—a late-stage, undetected abdominal pregnancy—are increasingly rare in the modern medical world. This makes historical and recent cases, like the 82-year-old Colombian woman’s, all the more compelling as a genuine medical marvel and a poignant piece of human physiology. It stands as a powerful reminder that our own bodies contain the secrets to some of the most intricate and extreme survival stories.
Source:
CBS News. (2013, December 13). 40-year-old calcified fetus found in Colombian woman.