Woman, 37, with stomach cramps and bloating told there’s a baby growing in her BOWEL – and it defies odds to survive

A WOMAN suffering from stomach cramps and bloating was shocked to the discover she was actually pregnant with a 23-week old baby.

But that wasn’t all – the 37-year-old was a rare ectopic pregnancy that meant a baby was growing in her bowel.

NEJM.ORGA 37-year-old women who visited A&E with abdominal pain was shocked to discover she was actually 23 weeks pregnant[/caption]

Foetuses usually develop in the uterus, also known as the womb, an organ situated in the lower abdomen.

But with an ectopic pregnancy, the fertilised egg that eventually grows into a child implants itself outside the lining of the womb.

It’s most common for this to happen in the fallopian tubes, which connect the ovaries to the womb.

When an egg gets stuck on them, this means the egg won’t develop into a baby and it might put your health at risk if it’s left untreated.

Around one in every 90 pregnancies in the UK are ectopic, according to the NHS.

It’s much rarer for the egg to implant somewhere other that the female reproductive organs.

The 37-year-old woman in question – who lived on a “remote island”, according to The New England Journal of Medicine – went to the emergency department after experiencing stomach cramps for 10 days.

Doctors noted that she looked pregnant during her physical examination and an ultrasound – technology that uses sound waves to make pictures of organs – revealed she was in fact 23 weeks along.

Though she’d already had two vaginal pregnancies, further scans showed that this “normally formed” foetus was growing in her abdomen, leading doctors to diagnose the woman with a rare abdominal pregnancy.

According to the journal Mary Ann Liebert, “abdominal pregnancy is the least-common of all types of ectopic pregnancies, representing less than 1 per cent of ectopic pregnancies”, with an incidence of 1 per 10,000 live births”.

It adds that it can cause “a significant threat” to a mum’s life due to “its impact on vital organs”.

As the woman was at high risk of heavy bleeding and there was also the risk that the child might die, the study authors said she was transferred to a specialist hospital.

When the pregnancy was 29 weeks along, the woman went into surgery where doctors cut into her abdomen – called a laparotomy – and delivered the baby, against all odds.

The little one was transferred to the neonatal intensive care unit.

While the mum was discharged from hospital 25 days later, it took two months for her baby to come home to her – but come home it did.

“The mother, who had declined contraception post-partum, was lost to follow-up,” the study authors concluded in their telling of this bizarre case study.