Miracle baby survives abdominal pregnancy
Published: September 27, 2005
Doctors in London, Ontario, have witnessed a miracle, after a woman gave birth following a rare extrauterine pregnancy.
“We won’t see another case like this in my lifetime,” Dr. Victor Han, chairman of the division of neonatal-perinatal medicine at St. Joseph’s told the Medical Post.
“A case like this won’t happen in the lifetime of my colleagues either. Probably not even in Canada. It is so rare.”
So rare, in fact, there have only been four similar cases reported worldwide.
Lia Tharby delivered her daughter, Emylea, at 33 weeks during emergency surgery to perform a vertical cesarean section.
“My heart melts every morning that I see her,” Tharby told CTV News. “She is the most beautiful child I could ever dream of having.”
From the beginning of her pregnancy, Tharby was in and out of hospital with severe abdominal pain. But the doctors couldn’t determine what was causing it. Nor could they explain why the baby she was carrying was not encased in the normal sac of fluid.
“It was difficult to figure out why there was no amniotic fluid around the baby despite the fact the baby had normal organ structure,” Dr. Renato Natale, associate chief of obstetrics at St. Joseph’s Health Care and the London Health Sciences Centre, told CTV News.
“We were at a loss.”
What they didn’t know is that the fertilized egg had fallen into the abdominal cavity. And the placenta that feeds the baby had implanted on the outside of the uterus.
“They only found out when they opened me up and took her out. That’s the only time we knew for sure she was outside the womb. And it shocked me as much as it shocked them,” Tharby said.
Emylea had dislocated hips and club feet and her skull was flattened due to the fact that she was squished beneath her mother’s liver and bowels during the pregnancy.
While she will require surgery for her hip and bracing for her feet, Emylea is otherwise a normal, healthy four-month-old.
“What went through out minds was, wow, how can this happen?” said Dr. Han.
“It really has befuddled us all in terms of how effective that placenta was in terms of supporting the baby’s growth as where it was implanted in an entirely hostile environment,” Dr. Natale explained.
And that raises an intriguing question. If the placenta can grow outside the uterus, is it possible for men to carry babies as well?
“If the appropriate conditions are created like hormones, any living person either woman or man could conceive,” Dr. Han told CTV News.
But Dr. Natale isn’t so sure.
“I don’t want to go there,” he said.
The irony is that if Emylea’s predicament had been discovered early on, the pregnancy might have been terminated. The fact she eluded detection means she is now a medical marvel.
See also: Miracle baby beats 1 in 13 million odds to survive
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