Huang Yijun,
aged 92, is from southern China and she recently made news after delivering a
baby known as a lithopedion, aka ‘Stone Baby’.
Huang Yijun told the press she didn’t have the
money to have her foetus removed after doctors told her it had died inside her
in 1948. So she simply did nothing at all about it.
Lithopedion is a very rare medical phenomenon,
which occurs when a pregnancy fails and the foetus actually calcifies while
still in the mother’s body.
Medically, what often happens is the implanted
foetus gets to an advanced stage before it dies. Too large to be absorbed by
the body, the remains of the child or its surrounding amniotic sac slowly
calcify, turning to stone as a way to protect the woman’s body from infection
from the decomposing tissue.
If no complications occur, believe it or not,
the mother can basically just go on with her life.
According to
the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, only 290 cases of lithopedions
have ever been documented by medical literature.
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