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 developed outside his mother’s womb, hidden by a basketball-sized ovarian cyst — a dangerous situation so rare that his doctors plan to write about the case for a medical journal.
Just one in 30,000 pregnancies occur in the abdomen instead of the uterus, and those that make it to full term “are essentially unheard of — far, far less than one in a million,” said John Ozimek, medical director of labor and delivery at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, where Ryu was born. “I mean, this is really insane.”
Photo: AP
Lopez, a 41-year-old nurse who lives in Bakersfield, California, did not know that she was pregnant with her second child until days before giving birth.
When her belly began to grow earlier this year, she thought it was her ovarian cyst getting bigger. Doctors had been monitoring the mass since her 20s, leaving it in place after removing her right ovary and another cyst.
Lopez experienced none of the usual pregnancy symptoms, such as morning sickness, and never felt kicks. Although she did not have a period, her cycle is irregular and she sometimes goes years without one.
Photo: AP
For months, she and her husband, Andrew Lopez, went about their lives and traveled abroad.
However, the pain and pressure in her abdomen got worse, and Suze Lopez figured it was finally time to get the 10kg cyst removed. She needed a CT scan, which required a pregnancy test first because of the radiation exposure. To her great surprise, the test came back positive.
She shared the news with her husband at a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball game in August, handing him a package with a note and a onesie.
“I just saw her face and she just looked like she wanted to weep and smile and cry at the same time,” he said.
Shortly after the game, Suze Lopez began feeling unwell and sought help at Cedars-Sinai. It turned out she had dangerously high blood pressure, which the medical team stabilized. They also did blood work and gave her an ultrasound and an MRI. The scans found that her uterus was empty, but a nearly full-term fetus in an amniotic sac was hiding in a small space in her abdomen, near her liver.
“It did not look like it was directly invading any organs,” Ozimek said. “It 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.”
Cara Heuser, a maternal-fetal specialist in Utah not involved with the case, said that almost all pregnancies that implant outside the uterus — called ectopic pregnancies — go on to rupture and hemorrhage if not removed.
Most commonly, they occur in the fallopian tubes.
A 2023 medical journal article by doctors in Ethiopia described another abdominal pregnancy in which the mother and baby survived, adding that fetal mortality can be as high as 90 percent in such cases and birth defects affect about one in five surviving babies.
However, the Lopez family beat the odds.
On Aug. 18, a medical team delivered the 3.6kg baby while his mother was under full anesthesia, removing the cyst during the same surgery.
She lost nearly all of her blood, but the team got the bleeding under control and gave her transfusions, Ozimek said.
Doctors continually updated her husband about what was going on in the delivery room.
“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.”
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 approached, Suze Lopez described feeling blessed beyond measure.
“I do believe in miracles,” she said, looking down at her baby. “God gave us this gift — the best gift ever.”
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
A Sherpa guide was found crawling to base camp on Mount Everest a week after he went missing and was reunited with his family, who had given up hope he would return. Dawa Sherpa was last seen on Friday last week descending the mountain, but he did not reach base camp even though his client did. The pair were among the last climbers on the mountain as the climbing season came to an end and the route was dismantled. Dawa was located by a cleaning crew on Thursday morning as he was crawling down the snowy slopes around the Khumbu Icefall, just above
RSS