'Cancer' turns out to be 38-year ectopic pregnancy.

Kantabai Thakre knew she had an ectopic pregnancy in 1978. Doctors told her the terrible pain was due to the baby growing outside her womb and it could not survive, and her life was in danger. They had to operate.

She ran away, and eventually the pain passed. 38 years later Mrs Thakre was in pain again. Doctors felt a hard mass on her right side and thought she had cancer. But scans revealed the nearly 40-year-old skeleton of her baby, in a calcified sac that was pressing on her kidney and causing the pain and problems. It's thought to be the world's oldest recorded ectopic pregnancy.

Warning: Photo of skeletal remains at link. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/a...eft-inside-mother-38-YEARS.html#ixzz3B3pjhZY6

Aaaaack. That is why you don't run away when medical professionals are telling you you need to do something. Sure, get a second opinion, but to run away for forty years?! Oi

I've seen this before, I think also in India. I'm going to guess that the woman didn't have access to a lot of different medical options and did not have a great understanding of what the ectopic pregnancy/removal procedure entailed. The fact that she did not miscarry would be a sign to someone educated about biology that the child was still inside of her. It's unfortunate that most people do not have the resources to fully understand their medical conditions. I wonder if she was able to have any subsequent pregnancies.

I've seen it before also. May be the same one but it's been quite a while since I've seen it and the article is recent. IIRC it was on TLC.

I wonder how it was possible her tube didn't explode.

Bar Bee Jay said:

I've seen it before also. May be the same one but it's been quite a while since I've seen it and the article is recent. IIRC it was on TLC.

I wonder how it was possible her tube didn't explode.

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I think it did and that's how the pregnancy matures - that's why she was probably having severe pain for a while. Before modern medicine/ultrasounds etc., I think that's what resulted from an ectopic pregnancy - sometimes the woman survived, sometimes she didn't. Usually when the tube burst, the embryo died, but I saw another case where it somehow attached to the mother's body so that a placenta could grow and the baby could go to full-term. But because this woman also lacked access to medical care, no one realized what had happened, and it died when it couldn't be born. I think I even saw a case once where a woman did have medical care and the child actually lived because they delivered via C-section. But usually the fetus and/or the mother dies.