I am so hooked on Discovery Health channel. Tonight they had a show that was a 76 year old woman who had been pregnant for 46 years. Crazy stuff! And another woman who had triplets, but one was in her abdominal cavity and two were in her uterus. Crazy stuff.

To my way of thinking, any woman who has been pregnant for 46 years should know what causes that and learn what moderation is all about. I'd be more interested if science found a way to make men bear children and the birthing pains. :D

46 years?

Was she in a coma or something? Suspended animation?

Or did the child come out, put on a suit and go to work in a bank? :)

I didn't see the show but I assumed that the woman continued to get pregnant and have kids. I wouldn't have thought that 46 years was ONE pregnancy unless a fetus died and was blocked off from her body by her immune system. But if the fetus is dead, she wouldn't really be pregnant.

It was a single prenancy. The woman was from Morocco. Ok, here's what happened. It was an ectopic prenancy that burst out of her fallopian tube. The placenta attached to her internal organs and the prenancy continued as normal, except rather than the placenta attaching to the uterus, it's on her bladder and stuff. Eventually the baby dies, quite far along in the prenancy and the mom thinks she is in labor, so she goes to the hospital. The baby doesn't come out... of course. So the doctors want to do a cesearean, if they had they probably would've killed her by jostling the plancenta, which has large veins to internal organs. She would have hemmoraged.

She sees a lady die in labor in the next room, gets scared and leaves the hospital. After a few days with a lot of pain, the pain stops. She things the "baby has gone to sleep". She never has any trouble until she is 76 years old.

So, fortunately medical science has moved along, they do an ultrasound and find this... THING in her abdomen. Its sort of baby shaped. Eventually they decide to risk an operation and the baby is totally calcified, which is what the body does to foreign objects to protect the host. So they carefully detach it from the internal organs and remove it. She was one incredibly lucky woman. Usually women die from this sort of condition by the placenta detaching from the internal organs and causing hemorraging.