Baby is born after the rarest of pregnancies, defying all odds

Suze Lopez holds her baby boy on her lap and marvels at the remarkable way he came into the world.

Before little Ryu was born, he grew outside his mother’s womb, hidden by an ovarian cyst the size of a basketball – a dangerous situation so rare that his doctors are considering writing about the case in a medical journal.

Only 1 in 30,000 pregnancies occur in the abdomen rather than the uterus, and those that come to term “are essentially unknown — far, far less than 1 in a million,” said Dr. John Ozimek, medical director of labor and delivery at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, where Ryu was born. “I mean, it’s really crazy.”

Lopez, a 41-year-old nurse who lives in Bakersfield, California, didn’t 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 growing. Doctors had been monitoring the mass since she was 20, leaving it in place after removing her right ovary and another cyst.

Lopez didn’t experience any of the usual pregnancy symptoms, such as morning sickness, and never felt any kicks. Even though she hasn’t had a period, her cycle is irregular and she sometimes goes years without having a period.

For months, she and her husband Andrew Lopez went about their business and traveled abroad.

But gradually the pain and pressure in her abdomen got worse, and Lopez thought it was finally time to remove the 22-pound cyst. She needed a CT scan, which first required a pregnancy test due to radiation exposure. To his surprise, the test 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 a jumpsuit.

“I just saw her face,” he recalled, “and she just looked like she wanted to cry and smile and cry at the same time.”

Shortly after the match, Lopez began feeling ill and sought help at Cedars-Sinai. It turned out she had dangerously high blood pressure, which the medical team stabilized. They also did blood tests and gave him an ultrasound and an MRI. Scans revealed that her uterus was empty, but a near-term fetus in an amniotic sac was hiding in a small space in her abdomen, near her liver.

“It didn’t seem like it was directly invading any organs,” Ozimek said. “It seemed like it was primarily implanted in the side wall of the pelvis, which is also very dangerous but more manageable than being implanted in the liver.”

Dr. Cara Heuser, a Utah maternal-fetal specialist not involved in the case, said almost all pregnancies that implant outside the uterus — called ectopic pregnancies — rupture and result in hemorrhage if not removed. Most often they occur in the fallopian tubes.

A 2023 medical journal article by Ethiopian doctors describes another abdominal pregnancy in which both mother and baby survived, noting that fetal mortality can be as high as 90% in such cases and that birth defects are seen in approximately 1 in 5 surviving babies.

But Lopez and his son defied all odds.

On August 18, a medical team delivered the 3.6 kilogram baby while she was under full anesthesia, removing the cyst in the same operation. She lost almost all of her blood, Ozimek said, but the team controlled the bleeding and gave her transfusions.

The doctors continually informed her husband of what was happening.

“All this time, I might have looked calm on the outside, but I was doing nothing but praying on the inside,” Andrew Lopez said. “It was just something that almost scared me, knowing that at any moment I could lose my wife or my child.”

Instead, they both recovered well.

“It was really, really remarkable,” Ozimek said.

Since then, Ryu – named after a baseball player and a 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, Kaila, and say he completes their family.

As Ryu’s first Christmas approaches, Lopez describes feeling blessed beyond measure.

“I believe in miracles,” she said, looking at her baby. “God gave us this gift – the best gift there is. »

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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. The AP is solely responsible for all content.