Mummified 'stone baby' found in belly of old woman, 73, which she carried for 35 years
In today's quota of bizarre news, we have a 73-year-old woman from Skikda, Algeria who was found with a petrified 'stone baby' in her womb, that she has been carrying around for over 35 years. The shocking discovery was made by a medical at a health facility in the eastern Algerian city, where the elderly lady came in with the complaint of abnormal body pain. She has otherwise lived a normal life for decades, without ever feeling the presence of the calcified fetus inside her own body.
While 'stone baby' is definitely a medical miracle, the Algerian woman is not the first woman to experience the same. It is actually a highly rare condition where a calcified fetus called lithopedion can stay inside a woman's womb for years without any external symptoms. In fact, there are only 290 reported cases of lithopedion across history. The first-ever such case was recorded back in 1582 when a 'stone baby' was found in the belly of a French woman named Madame Colombe Chatri, after she passed away at the age of 68 years.
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As for the case of the Algerian woman, whose identity has not been revealed, the fossilized fetus weighed around 4.5 lbs and was aged around 7 months. Moreover, X-ray scans revealed the presence of the lithopedion inside her belly but not her womb. She had originally conceived the baby back in 1981 but suffered a miscarriage.
However, when the body lacks adequate blood supply to expel the fetus, the body eventually calcifies the baby and turns it into 'stone' over the years. The process is similar to stone forming in other organs of the body due to the calcification of foreign objects over a period of time. It is believed that the Algerian woman encountered such a case.
"Most of the time people find these and [sometimes] even after they're found and don't do anything about it because they're totally asymptomatic," Dr Kim Garcsi from University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland, told ABC News.
In fact, the woman here had undergone radiation in the past but the fossilized fetus was not discovered, until the recent CT scan. She was found to be carrying a human baby-like structure that many considered similar to a pharaoh's mummy.