A Californian mother has described her baby’s birth as a “miracle” after he developed outside her womb, hidden by a basketball-sized ovarian cyst, a situation so rare that doctors plan to document the case for a medical journal.
Suze Lopez, a 41-year-old nurse from Bakersfield, was unaware she was pregnant with her second child until days before giving birth to her son, Ryu.
Her pregnancy was an abdominal one, where the foetus grows in the abdomen rather than the uterus, a condition occurring in just 1 in 30,000 pregnancies. Those that reach full term are “essentially unheard of — far, far less than 1 in a million,” according to Dr John Ozimek, medical director of labour and delivery at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, where Ryu was born. “I mean, this is really insane,” he added.
For months, Lopez believed her growing belly was due to an enlarging ovarian cyst, which doctors had been monitoring since her twenties.
She experienced none of the typical pregnancy symptoms, such as morning sickness or foetal kicks, and her irregular menstrual cycle meant a missed period raised no alarms. She and her husband, Andrew Lopez, even traveled abroad during this time.
However, as abdominal pain and pressure intensified, Lopez decided it was time to have the 22-pound (10-kilogram) cyst removed. A routine pregnancy test, required before a CT scan due to radiation exposure, delivered the astonishing news: she was pregnant.
Lopez shared the news with her husband at a baseball game in August, presenting him with a note and a baby onesie. He recalled seeing her face, “and she just looked like she wanted to weep and smile and cry at the same time.”
Shortly after, Lopez sought help at Cedars-Sinai due to dangerously high blood pressure. Scans revealed her uterus was empty, but a nearly full-term fetus in an amniotic sac was nestled in a small space in her abdomen, near her liver. Dr Ozimek noted it appeared “mostly implanted on the sidewall of the pelvis, which is also very dangerous but more manageable than being implanted in the liver.”
Dr Cara Heuser, a maternal-fetal specialist not involved in the case, explained that most ectopic pregnancies, which implant outside the uterus, rupture and haemorrhage if not removed. Fetal mortality in such cases can be as high as 90%, with birth defects seen in about 1 in 5 surviving babies.
Defying all odds, Lopez and her son survived. On August 8, a medical team delivered an 8-pound (3.6-kilogram) baby while Lopez was under full anaesthesia, removing the cyst during the same surgery. She lost nearly all her blood, but the team controlled the bleeding and administered transfusions.
Andrew Lopez described his terror during the ordeal: “The whole time, I might have seemed calm on the outside, but I was doing nothing but praying on the inside. It was just something that scared me half to death, knowing that at any point I could lose my wife or my child.”
Both mother and baby recovered well. Ryu, named after a baseball player and a video game character, is now healthy and thriving. As his first Christmas approaches, Lopez feels “blessed beyond measure.”
“I do believe in miracles,” she said, looking at her baby. “God gave us this gift — the best gift ever.”