Skeleton removed after 38 years from an Indian woman's abdomen was surprisingly discovered by a doctor after the woman started having a stomach ache. Things got worse, and eventually, 62-year-old Jyoti Kumar went to a doctor to find out the problem. What the doctor found would unexpectedly turn out to be a skeleton removed after 38 years.
According to KTVU, the 38-year-old skeleton was a baby Kumar lost to an ectopic pregnancy when she was 24 years old, in 1978.
Doctors now believe that the skeleton removed after 38 years is the world's longest ectopic pregnancy, after being left inside Kumar's abdomen for nearly four decades.
According to the Daily Mail, during her pregnancy at 24, doctors had warned Kumar that her unborn child was growing outside of her womb. They said there was little chance of survival for the baby.
Because removal of the unborn child required surgery, Kumar was terrified. She apparently wasn't ready for an operation, thus she fled the hospital and instead went to a small clinic to seek treatment for the pain.
Because the pain went away after a few months, Kumar became convinced that there was no longer any reason to worry and that the problem was gone.
Little did she know that not going through with the surgery would turn out to be the skeleton removed after 38 years. Almost forty years after the incident, Kumar began experiencing constant pain in her abdomen.
Multiple reports say that the woman visited the NKP Salve Institute of Medical Sciences, in the central Indian city of Nagpur and asked for doctors' expertise.
Doctors reportedly felt a lump on her lower right side. A sonography and CT scan ordered for Kumar later revealed a mass made of hard, calcified matter inside her stomach. She found out that her unborn child was still inside of her.
Dr Murtaza Akhtar, head of surgery at the hospital, said of the events leading up to the skeleton removed after 38 years, "She was complaining of consistent pain in her abdomen and she had urinary problems with high fever. Then we found a lump on her right side but we feared it was cancer."
The doctor added, "After she went for an MRI and CT scan we could make out that it was actually a matured skeleton encapsulated in a calcified sac. When we asked her for her medical history she told us that she was pregnant in 1978 but her child had died."
Akhtar said, "She told us she had got scared and went home to her village without ever removing the fetus. She only took some treatment from her local a health centre."
According to the doctor, the unborn child's skeleton removed after 38 years "could be the world's longest ectopic pregnancy."
The team therefore searched medical literature on similar cases to verify their theory. They reportedly found a Belgian woman who had retained the remains of an ectopic pregnancy for 18 years. This was already the longest period of an ectopic pregnancy they could find on record.
A Dr Mohammad Yunus Shah also added, "We believe this could be the longest case on record at 38 years. We asked for a detailed medical history and all we could get was that the patient's brother told us that in 1978 she was pregnant and had some complications."
The doctor added, "She apparently knew that the baby had died and that she would need an operation, and we gathered she got scared at the prospect of surgery and so went away to her village without undergoing the operation."
While doing the surgery on the skeleton removed after 38 years, the Daily Mail reports that the team of surgeons discovered the mass inside Kumar's stomach to be containing a matured skeleton inside a calcified sac.
Shah's team removed the mass which, according to the International Business Times, had been stuck between Kumar's uterus, intestines and bladder.
Dr Shah said, "The amniotic fluid that protects the foetus might have been absorbed and the soft tissues liquefied over time with only a bag of bones with some fluid remaining."
Skeleton removed after 38 years hadn't been a simple problem, though it had gone unnoticed for such a long time. According to the Daily Mail, Kumar had been experiencing pain and urinary problems with fever for the last few months. Shah said that the complications Kumar has now could probably have been caused by the skeleton compressing the urinary system, which in turn compromises the functioning of kidneys.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
