When Suze Lopez went to the doctor back in August, the last thing the 41-year-old woman from Bakersfield, California, thought was that she would soon be having a baby.
After all, Lopez had no reason to suspect she was pregnant: She had not felt any kicks, had no morning sickness, and her cycle was irregular to begin with. Plus, she only had one ovary — doctors had removed the other one years ago when treating an ovarian cyst.
In fact, when Lopez went to the doctor, she assumed that another ovarian cyst, one doctors had been monitoring for nearly two decades, was the reason why her stomach had swelled and why she was feeling increased pressure in her abdomen. But before she could get a CT scan to get the cyst examined, Lopez had to take a pregnancy test.
It came back positive.
Not long after telling her husband that she was pregnant, Lopez fell ill. It was only then that doctors discovered that her pregnancy was more unusual than anyone could have imagined: There was no baby in her uterus.
Instead, doctors found what they thought was impossible: a nearly fully-term baby in an amniotic sac located near her liver. The large ovarian cyst, roughly the size of a basketball, had hidden her baby throughout the pregnancy.
Only about 1 in 30,000 pregnancies occur in the abdomen instead of the uterus, and one of these pregnancies making it full term is “essentially unheard of — far, far less than 1 in a million,” said Dr. John Ozimek, medical director of labor and delivery at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, the hospital where Lopez delivered, told the Associated Press. "I mean, this is really insane.”
Any pregnancy that implants outside of the uterine wall is known as an ectopic pregnancy. The majority of these occur in the fallopian tubes. While ectopic pregnancies located in fallopian tubes or ovaries are not viable pregnancies, there have been rare cases of successful pregnancies where babies have developed in a woman's abdomen, cervix, or Cesarean scar.
In Lopez's case, her pregnancy "looked like it was mostly implanted on the sidewall of the pelvis, which is also very dangerous, but more manageable than being implanted in the liver," said Ozimek.
On August 18, Lopez delivered 8-pound Ryu, in a surgery that required her to be put under full anesthesia. She lost "nearly all" of her blood, said the Associated Press, but was able to be saved by blood transfusions.
Her husband, Andrew Lopez, told the Associated Press that while he acted strong during his son's birth, he was terrified.
“The whole time, I might have seemed calm on the outside, but I was doing nothing but praying on the inside,” Andrew Lopez said. “It was just something that scared me half to death, knowing that at any point I could lose my wife or my child.”
Despite the scary birth and extremely high-risk pregnancy, both mother and baby recovered well, something Ozimek called "really, really remarkable."
As for Lopez? She is acutely aware of how lucky she is to be alive, and how amazingly special her son is.
“I do believe in miracles,” she told the Associated Press. “God gave us this gift — the best gift ever.”
