Women Went Into Hospital For Bladder Stones Only To Discover A Calcified Stone Baby Inside Of Her

In a recent TikTok, Dr. Karan Raj ― who’s known for spreading his medical wisdom on the app ― Stitched a video about a “stone baby.”

The initial video showed an X-ray of a woman with a calcified fetus in her abdomen.

“Patient went for a bladder stone, turns out it’s a calcified baby she never birthed,” the Stitched video said.

I was honestly expecting the doctor’s following video to be a debunking ― so I was shocked to hear him say “This is a stone baby, also known as a lithopedion.”

The doctor explains that the extremely rare lithopedions come from ectopic pregnancies ― those in which the fetus starts to develop somewhere outside of the womb.

The fetus can begin to grow anywhere from the liver to the abdomen, Dr. Raj said – but lithopedions come from abdominal ectopic pregnancies.

“Usually, an abdominal ectopic pregnancy would be reabsorbed by the mother’s body” once the embryo had died, he shared.

“But if it’s too large, it becomes a foreign body to the immune system ― and now to stop this dead, fetal tissue causing a widespread infection to the body, the mother’s immune system will calcify and encapsulate the fetus.”