Susie Lopez holds her Baby the boy is on her lap, and admires how wonderful he is came into the world.
Before little Ryu was bornit developed outside the womb, hidden by an ovarian cyst the size of a basketball – a dangerous situation so rare that his doctors plan to write about the case for a medical journal.
Only 1 in 30,000 pregnancies occur in the abdomen rather than the uterus, and those that survive to full term are “essentially unheard of—much, much less than 1 in a million,” said Dr. John Ozimek, medical director of obstetrics at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, where Ryu was born. “I mean, it's really crazy.”
Lopez, a 41-year-old nurse living in Bakersfield, California, found out she was pregnant with her second child a few days before her due date.
When her belly started growing earlier this year, she thought it was due to an enlarged ovarian cyst. Doctors had been monitoring the mass since she was 20, leaving it in place after removing her right ovary and another cyst.
Lopez did not experience any of the usual pregnancy symptoms, such as morning sickness, and never felt a kick. Although she has not had a period, her cycles are irregular and she can sometimes go for years without a period.
For several months, she and her husband, Andrew Lopez, lived their lives and traveled abroad.
But gradually the pain and pressure in her abdomen increased, and Lopez decided it was finally time to remove the 22-pound cyst. She required a CT scan, which first required a pregnancy test due to radiation exposure. Much to her surprise, the test came back positive.
Lopez shared the news with her husband at a Dodgers baseball game in August, handing him a bag with a note and a onesie.
“I just saw her face,” he recalled, “and she looked like she wanted to cry and smile and cry all at the same time.”
Shortly after the game, Lopez felt ill and sought help at Cedars-Sinai. It turned out that she had dangerously high blood pressure, which doctors stabilized. They also did blood tests, an ultrasound and an MRI. The scan showed her uterus was empty, but a nearly full-term fetus in the amniotic sac was hidden in a small space in her abdomen, next to her liver.
“It doesn’t appear that it directly invaded any organs,” Ozimek said. “It looked like it was basically implanted on the side wall of the pelvis, which is also very dangerous, but more manageable than implantation in the liver.”
Dr. Kara Heuser, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in Utah who is not involved in the case, said almost all pregnancies in which implantation occurs outside the uterus (called ectopic pregnancies) end in rupture and bleeding if they are not removed. Most often they occur in the fallopian tubes.
Medical journal article 2023. Doctors from Ethiopia described another abdominal pregnancy in which mother and baby survived, noting that fetal mortality in such cases can be as high as 90%, and birth defects occur in about 1 in 5 surviving children.
But Lopez and her son beat the odds.
On August 18, the medical team delivered the 8-pound (3.6-kilogram) baby under full anesthesia, removing a cyst during the same surgery. She lost almost all of her blood, but the team got the bleeding under control and gave her a blood transfusion, Ozimek said.
Doctors kept her husband informed of what was happening.
“All this time, I may have seemed calm on the outside, but on the inside I was doing nothing but praying,” Andrew Lopez said. “It was something that scared me half to death, knowing that at any moment I could lose my wife or my child.”
Instead, they both recovered well.
“It was really wonderful,” Ozimek said.
Since then, Ryu, named after the baseball player and character in the Street Fighter video game series, has been healthy and thriving. His parents enjoy watching him interact with his 18-year-old sister Kayla and say he completes their family.
Lopez describes Rue's first Christmas approaching and feeling immensely happy.
“I believe in miracles,” she said, looking at her child. “God gave us this gift—the best gift in the world.”
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. AP is solely responsible for all content.
