A Brazilian woman in her 80s who went to the hospital with stomach pains had a fetus in her uterus that was 44 years old. A doctor in the central Brazilian state of Tocantins did an X-ray on the woman’s stomach and found a “stone baby.”
The X-ray showed “the face, the bones of the arms, the bones of the legs, the ribs, and the spine” of a baby that died between 20 and 28 weeks.
The woman told the doctors that she knew she was pregnant 40 years ago. She went to a witch doctor when she had pain during her pregnancy. The witch doctor gave her a mixture to drink.
She said that the medicine made her feel better right away. “Her stomach stopped growing, the baby stopped moving, and she thought she had lost the baby,” Gesneria Saraiva Kratka, a doctor at Porto Nacional Hospital, told G1.
The baby died, but it didn’t come out of her. When this happens, the fetus is covered in calcium to protect the body from the dead baby. The result is a “stone baby,” which is a medical disease called lithopedion.
Kratka said, “It’s supernatural, but she hasn’t had any trouble with it.” “We’re going to do some new tests and scans to find out more, and then we’ll talk to her family to see if they’re okay with us operating.”It is said that the woman doesn’t want the baby to be taken away.
In a similar case in Colombia in December, a baby that was 40 years old was taken out of a woman who was 82 years old. China had the oldest case of lithopedion on record in 2013. The 92-year-old woman said she was told the fetus had died in 1948, but she didn’t have enough money to have it taken out.