Little Ryu
“I believe in miracles,” says the mother; “This is crazy,” said the doctor. The uterus was empty, but there was a near-term fetus inside an amniotic sac in the abdomen.
The case is considered extraordinarily rare and it happened recently in the USA, more precisely at Cedars-Sinai hospital, in Los Angeles, where the boy Ryu It was born miraculously, after having developed in a very, very different way than what is common.
The newborn developed not in the mother’s uterus, but in the abdominal cavityhidden behind an ovarian cyst the size of a basketball, advances the .
According to obstetrician John Ozimek, medical director of the birthing service at that hospital, only about one in every 30 thousand Pregnancies occur in the abdomen rather than the uterus. And reaching the end of the pregnancy and having the baby, he adds, is “practically unheard of”, with the probability “way, way below one in a million.”
“I mean, this is really crazy,” adds the doctor.
The mother, Suze Lopez, is 41 years old, is a nurse and lives in Bakersfield, California. She only discovered she was pregnant a few days before giving birth to her second child. and for months he attributed the increase in abdominal volume to the ovarian cyst that doctors had been monitoring since he was 20 years old.
Medical history helped mask signs of pregnancy. Lopez had previously undergone removal of her right ovary and another cyst, but the current mass was left in place and was being monitored over the years. Furthermore, the mother did not experience typical pregnancy symptoms, such as morning nausea, nor did she feel fetal movements. She was also not surprised by the absence of menstruation: her cycle is irregular and, sometimes, she goes years without a period.
During this time, she and her husband, Andrew, maintained their routine and even traveled abroad. But the pain and pressure in her abdomen worsened, leading her to decide it was time to remove the cyst, which ended up weighing around 10 kg. To perform a CT scan, it was necessary to first take a pregnancy test. THE positive result caught her completely off guard.
The couple shared the news in an equally unlikely way: at a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball game in August, Suze handed her husband a package with a note and a pair of baby onesie pajamas.
Shortly thereafter, Suze began to feel unwell and sought care at Cedars-Sinai. The team detected severe hypertension and stabilized the condition. Analysis, ultrasound and MRI followed, which revealed a completely miraculous finding: the uterus was empty, but there was a fetus almost at the end of its term, inside an amniotic sac, in a tight space in the abdomen, close to the liver. The implantation seemed to be located mainly on the lateral wall of the pelvis: dangerous, but considered more “manageable” than direct fixation in the liver.
Experts emphasize that almost all extra-uterine pregnancies, known as ectopicthey end up rupturing and causing bleeding if not treated. One from 2023 cited by CBS reports fetal mortality that can reach 90% in abdominal pregnancies and points to malformations in around one in five surviving babies.
But despite the risks, mother and son survived. A multidisciplinary team performed the birth under general anesthesia and removed the cyst in the same surgery. Suze lost almost all her blood and needed transfusions, but the bleeding was controlled and her recovery went well.
Ryu was born weighing around 3.6 kg and has been progressing healthily. The name was inspired by a baseball player and a character from the Street Fighter video game series.
“I believe in miracles,” says the mother. “God gave us this gift — the best gift of all.”
