A rarest of rare case has been uncovered in France after a 37-year-old woman discovered that she was 23 weeks pregnant. That’s not all. The lady got the shock of her life after knowing that it wasn’t a regular pregnancy, but a quite rare and mystifying one. Her unborn child was developing inside her bowel. This shocking case was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study revealed that the woman sought medical treatment after 10 days of severe abdominal pain and deteriorating bloating. After conducting a scan, medical experts were taken aback when they discovered that she was 23 weeks pregnant with a normally formed foetus, located not in her uterus but within her abdominal cavity, which is located between the stomach and the bowel.
As per the medical experts, this extraordinary situation accounts for less than 1 percent of ectopic pregnancies. Ectopic pregnancy is a condition where a fertilised egg implants outside the uterus. This condition typically constitutes less than 2 percent of all pregnancies and mostly occurs in the fallopian tubes.
Ectopic pregnancy poses a considerable threat to the mother, possibly resulting in tube rupture, internal bleeding, or shock, and it mostly results in the loss of the child. However, the doctors in France transferred the expectant mother to a tertiary hospital and successfully delivered the baby at 29 weeks. The little one was then placed in the neonatal intensive care unit.
Within three months postpartum, both the newborn baby and the mother were discharged from the hospital after navigating through potential complications.
As per a report by New York Post, in this kind of pregnancies the chance of losing the baby is as high as 90 percent. However, those kids who miraculously survive have a one in five chance of having brain damage or birth defects.
Meanwhile, this is not the first time that doctors have come across such a puzzling pregnancy and have found an embryo growing in an odd place. Back in 2021, a paediatrician took to social media and shared a rare case of a 33-year-old Canadian woman whose foetus was growing inside her liver.
Sharing a clip explaining the whole incident on social media, Children’s Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba paediatrician Dr Michael Narvey said, “I thought I had seen it all. A 33-year-old woman comes in with a 14-day history of menstrual bleeding and 49 days since her last menstrual period. She had an ectopic pregnancy in her liver."
“We see these sometimes in the abdomen but never in the liver. This is a first for me," he concluded.