Kantabai Thakre, a 60-year-old woman from India, was unaware of what was causing her stomach pain. She visited doctors thinking it was possibly a cancerous tumor but what they found was a shock to everyone!
Kantabai complained of stomach pains, fever, and urinary problems and went to NKP Salve Institute of Medical Sciences in Nagpur, India for treatment. Doctors feared she had cancer when they detected a lump on the right side of her abdomen.
Tests for the tumor came back negative, but they found something else.
Dr Murtaza Akhtar, head of surgery at the hospital, said, “After she went for an MRI and CT scan we could make out that it was actually a matured skeleton encapsulated in a calcified sac.”
Apparently, the woman had become pregnant at the age of 24 in 1978. She was told that the fetus might not survive because it was an ectopic pregnancy, where the fetus develops outside the uterus.
Kantabai lost the child but she was too afraid to go for surgery and took medications to subdue the pain. In time, the pain subsided and she thought the matter had resolved.
It turned out she was wrong.
“The amniotic fluid that protects the fetus might have been absorbed and the soft tissues liquefied over time with only a bag of bones with some fluid remaining,” said Dr. Mohammad Yunus Shah, another physician on Thakre’s team.
The woman had been carrying the skeleton of her lost baby in her abdomen for 38 years!
Her surgical team did some research and found that the longest case of a woman carrying the remains of an ectopic pregnancy was 18 years by a Belgian woman.
This surely is the most bizarre end to a pregnancy that no mother would want.
