[777] in Humor
WEIRD: Stone Baby
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew Bennett)
Sun Mar 19 21:47:17 1995
From: Andrew Bennett <abennett@MIT.EDU>
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 95 21:46:57 -2400
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 95 12:20:34 PST
LONDON (AP) -- A woman carried a fully calcified, 7
1/2-month-old fetus -- a so-called ``stone baby'' -- in her womb for
about 60 years, a British medical journal reports.
This Saturday's edition of The Lancet said the fetus was
discovered after the 92-year-old woman went to a hospital in
Vienna, Austria, suffering from senile dementia and pneumonia. She
died a week after being admitted.
An X-ray was taken after doctors examining her found ``a large
abdominal mass extending from the pelvis to the right upper
abdomen.''
Stone babies occur in about one in 250,000 pregnancies, but
rarely remain inside the mother for such a long time, The Lancet
said. The body naturally forms calcium on dead tissue that is too
large to be absorbed into the body.
Drs. Paul Speiser and Konrad Brezina, obstetricians at the
University of Vienna Medical School, said they determined, after
talking to her eldest son, that the woman became pregnant for a
fourth time when she was 32.
The fetus apparently died and became calcified.
The doctors said they believed the woman was unaware of the
fossilized fetus inside her.
