[Mr.Buttocks]

[quote="Mo McArab":de4cc]

12 March 2006
I KEPT MY 7LBS BABY INSIDE ME FOR 46 YEAR
EXCLUSIVE: MOST AMAZING REAL-LIFE STORY OF THE YEAR..
By Lara Gould Tv Reporter

A SUPERSTITIOUS woman carried a dead baby inside her for 46 years - because she thought it was SLEEPING.

Doctors found the foetus after Zahra Aboutalib, 81, was rushed to hospital with stomach pains.

They feared she had ovarian cancer but found the full-size baby after an ultrasound scan.

Incredibly, it was still the size of a full-term baby - weighing 7lbs.

Doctors say it was a miracle the mother survived and it is the first case of its kind where a baby was left inside a woman for so long.

Speaking about her ordeal for the first time, Zahra told a Five documentary that she thought her baby was ASLEEP all those years.

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She said: "People in my village said it was black magic and I thought if it was sleeping, I'd just let it stay there."

Zahra, who lives near Casablanca in Morocco, fell pregnant in 1955.

"I was very happy to be having this baby. I was looking forward to it," she said. But midwives didn't realize it was an ectopic pregnancy - when a fertilised egg implants itself outside the womb and begins to grow.

In most cases the pregnancy would be terminated after three months.

But Zahra's baby defied odds of 60 million to one to grow on the outside of her stomach and remain there for a full 40 weeks.

When she began to experience excruciating stomach pains nine months later, Zahra was rushed to hospital, believing she was about to give birth.

Doctors decided on a caesarean section when the baby failed to emerge after two days.

But Zahra, then aged 29, panicked after seeing another expectant mum die in labour and discharged herself. She said: "The doctor checked me and said if they didn't do the caesarean I wouldn't be able to have the baby. I had pains and bleeding.

"And I knew the baby wanted to come out. But when I saw what happened to that woman I couldn't stay there.

"I thought that if I was going to die, I would rather die at home."

She added: "I was like a crazy woman because I couldn't have my baby normally.

"I was in so much pain. But after a certain time I couldn't feel him anymore.

"It was then that he started sleeping. I could still feel him inside me. But I thought he had gone to sleep."

But Zahra was not in labour. The pains were the baby's movements as it struggled for oxygen inside her stomach - in vain.

After the baby died, Zahra never mentioned it again, making herself believe a local myth that the baby was asleep. Despite her harrowing ordeal she went on to adopt three other children. It wasn't until 46 years later that her secret unborn child was finally discovered when the pains returned and her son rushed her to hospital. Surgeons who made the grim discovery were then faced with the task of extracting the foetus, which had become embedded inside Zahra's body.

It had become mummified under a thick calcium coating, giving it a stone-like appearance.

Stone babies - officially named lithopedians - come about when a foetus dies during an ectopic pregnancy, but can't be re-absorbed into the mother's body.

The thick calcium deposit saved Zahra's life - allowing the foetus to remain inside her body without poisoning her.

Professor Taibi Quazzani, who led the four-hour operation to remove the baby, said: "The problem of extracting a body that has lived

within another body for 46 years is not something to gamble with. We had to isolate one body from within the other and then remove it.

"But it was attached to her internal organs, including her bladder, her stomach and her veins. "And one of the baby's hands had become intertwined with her intestines."

Zahra's lithopedian baby is one of just 300 cases ever reported, and the only one known where the mother has lived for so long with the dead infant inside her.

Professor Quazzani etosleep said: "It really is a miracle she survived. There were so many complications that could have killed her, haemor-raging, blood poisoning or her body rejecting the foetus."

But the medical implications don't impress Zahra: "When the doctors told me they'd discovered a mass inside me, they didn't know what it was," she said. "But I knew it was a baby. I knew it was my child."

I Gave Birth To A Mummy will be shown on Five on Monday, March 27 at 9pm.[/quote:de4cc]

[url=http://www.sundaymirror.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=16803927&method=full&siteid=62484&head line=i-kept-my-7lbs-baby-inside-me-for-46-year-name_page.html:de4cc]What the hoof?[/url:de4cc]