An 82-year-old Colombian woman went to the hospital with stomach pains on Monday and got a gruesome surprise, according to Fox. It turns out that her discomfort was caused by a calcified fetus that she had been carrying for the past 40 years.
Bogota’s Tunjuelito Hospital originally thought the woman was suffering from gastro-enteritis, a form of severe diarrhea but when an ultrasound came back negative for the disease, doctors ordered an abdominal X-ray discovered the fetus.
The woman’s condition is a rare medical phenomenon known as lithopedion wherea fetus develops and dies outside of the uterus in the abdominal cavity. If development stops and the fetus is too large to be absorbed by the body, it calcifies to protect the mother from dead tissue.
The woman was transferred to another hospital where she will undergo surgery to remove the fetus.