Suzy Lopez holds it child A boy is on her lap and marvels at the wonderful way he behaves He came into the world.
Before he was little Ryo childHe developed outside his mother’s womb, hidden by a basketball-sized ovarian cyst — a serious condition so rare that his doctors plan to write about it for a medical journal.
Only about one in every 30,000 pregnancies occur in the abdomen rather than the uterus, and cases that reach full term are “pretty unheard of — much, much less than one in a million,” said Dr. John Ozimek, medical director of labor and delivery at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, where Rio was born. “I mean this is really crazy.”
Lopez, a 41-year-old nurse who lives in Bakersfield, California, did not know she was pregnant with her second child until days before giving birth.
When her belly started growing earlier this year, she thought it was her ovarian cyst that was getting bigger. Doctors had been monitoring the mass since she was in her 20s, leaving it in place after removing her right ovary and another cyst.
Lopez didn’t feel any of the usual pregnancy symptoms, like morning sickness, and she never felt the kicks. Although she has not had her period, her cycle is irregular, and she can sometimes go years without a period.
For several months, she and her husband, Andrew Lopez, continued their lives and traveled abroad.
But gradually, the pain and pressure in her abdomen got worse, and Lopez thought it was finally time to have the 22-pound cyst removed. She needed to have a CT scan, which required a pregnancy test first due to radiation exposure. To her great surprise, the test result came back positive.
Lopez shared the news with her husband at a Dodgers baseball game in August, handing him a package containing a note and underwear.
“I just saw her face, and she looked like she wanted to cry and smile and cry at the same time,” he recalls.
Shortly after the match, Lopez began to feel unwell and sought help at Cedars-Sinai. It turned out that she was suffering from dangerously high blood pressure, and the medical team succeeded in stabilizing it. They also did blood tests and did an ultrasound and an MRI on her. Scans showed that her uterus was empty, but there was a nearly fully developed fetus in the amniotic sac hiding in a small space in her abdomen, near her liver.
“It didn’t appear to be directly invading any organs,” Ozimek said. “It appears to have been implanted mostly on the side wall of the pelvis, which is also very dangerous but more manageable than implanting it in the liver.”
Almost all pregnancies that implant outside the uterus — called ectopic pregnancies — continue to rupture and bleed if they are not removed, said Dr. Kara Heuser, a maternal-fetal pathologist in Utah who was not involved in the case. Most often, it occurs in the fallopian tube.
Article in a medical journal 2023 Doctors in Ethiopia described another abdominal pregnancy in which mother and baby survived, noting that the fetal death rate can reach 90% in such cases, and birth defects appear in about 1 in 5 surviving babies.
But Lopez and her son overcame all the odds.
On August 18, a medical team delivered the 8-pound (3.6 kg) baby girl while she was under general anesthesia, and the sac was removed during the same surgery. Ozimek said she lost almost all of her blood, but the team was able to control the bleeding and gave her blood transfusions.
Doctors kept her husband informed about what was happening.
“The whole time, I may have looked calm on the outside, but on the inside I was doing nothing but praying,” Andrew Lopez said. “It was just something that scared me to death, because I knew I could lose my wife or my child at any moment.”
Instead, they both recovered well.
“It was really cool,” Ozimek said.
Since then, Ryo — named after a baseball player and character in the Street Fighter video game series — has been healthy and thriving. His parents love watching him interact with his 18-year-old sister, Kayla, and say he completes their family.
As Rio’s first birthday approaches, Lopez describes feeling extremely happy.
“I believe in miracles,” she said, looking at her child. “God gave us this gift – the best gift ever.”
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. AP is solely responsible for all content.