Doctor Stunned After Patient's Rare Pregnancy Leaves Fetus In Her Liver

Published December 16, 2021

Although pregnancy can be a joyful and exciting time for a lot of people, it can also be a stressful and even scary time for many others.

The reasons for this vary from person to person, but a significant factor in these anxieties comes down to just how unpredictable pregnancies are. There are rare complications that can seem unthinkable until they actually happen and some people's bodies have unique traits that only reveal themselves during pregnancy.

For instance, some conditions like a tilted uterus can make some women unaware that they're even pregnant until they're close to giving birth.

But some of these rare possibilities are even more startling than that as they can actually threaten the lives of women when either they or the doctors they see don't pick up on them.

And as we're about to see, even doctors who are in tune with these possibilities can still be surprised.

Most pregnancies see a fertilized egg develop after it goes through a fallopian tube and attaches to the uterine lining.

Wikipedia Commons | James Heilman, MD

However, as the Mayo Clinic outlines, it's possible for an egg to get stuck in this tube and never reach the uterus, which is a form of ectopic pregnancy.

These tend to show the early signs of a standard pregnancy, but differ in the vaginal bleeding and severe pelvic and abdominal pain that serve as their warning signs.

If this goes untreated, the fallopian tube can burst, causing life-threatening internal bleeding.

But as a recent TikTok from Canadian pediatrician Dr. Michael Narvey illsustrates, these aren't the only places in the body where ectopic pregnancies can occur.

TikTok | @nicu_musings

And when a 33-year-old woman came to his practice with a 14-day history of menstrual bleeding when it had been 49 days since her last period, this was the issue Narvey figured he was dealing with.

However, even he was stunned to see that the woman's fetus had somehow traveled into her liver.

As he said, "This is a first for me."

And while it's rare for an ectopic pregnancy to manifest in somebody's abdomen, a baby finding its way into the liver is rare even by that standard.

TikTok | @nicu_musings

In Narvey's words, "We see these sometimes in the abdomen but never in the liver."

Indeed, the National Centre for Biotechnology Information confirmed this rarity as in the 35 years leading up to November of 1999, only 14 cases of an ectopic pregnancy in the liver have been recorded in the world.

And in the comments for the full video, Narvey reported that this pregnancy ended up putting the woman in a perilous position.

As he wrote, "Sadly the sac ruptured and the foetus had to be surgically removed to save mom."

However, she pulled through that operation and he has since confirmed that she is safe.

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