Suze Lopez, a 41-year-old nurse in Bakersfield, California, gave birth to a healthy baby boy after doctors diagnosed an extremely rare abdominal ectopic pregnancy, according to a case described by physicians at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles.
Before little Ryu was born, he had developed outside his mother’s womb, hidden by a basketball-sized ovarian cyst, AP reported. The report said the doctors planned to write about the case for publication in a medical journal.
Doctors said the pregnancy was so uncommon that it often does not reach term. Dr. John Ozimek, medical director of labor and delivery at Cedars-Sinai, said that about 1 in 30,000 pregnancies occur in the abdomen instead of the uterus. He added that pregnancies reaching full term are “essentially unheard of — far, far less than 1 in a million,” describing it as “really insane.”
Lopez did not know she was pregnant with her second child until days before giving birth. She told AP that when her belly began to grow earlier in the year, she assumed her abdominal swelling was from the ovarian cyst getting bigger. The mass had been monitored since her 20s, and the report said doctors had previously removed her right ovary and another cyst but left the mass in place.
The case also stood out because Lopez said she did not experience typical pregnancy signs. AP reported that she had no morning sickness and never felt kicks. She said she did not have a period and described having an irregular cycle, sometimes going years without menstruation, which limited the usual pregnancy clues.
For months, Lopez and her husband, Andrew Lopez, went about their lives and even traveled abroad, AP reported. But as pain and pressure in her abdomen worsened, she returned for care, seeking to have the cyst removed. The report said she needed a CT scan and that a pregnancy test had to be completed first because of radiation exposure; the test came back positive.
Lopez shared the news with Andrew Lopez at a Dodgers baseball game in August, handing him a package that included a note and a onesie, AP reported. Andrew Lopez later described being overwhelmed by her reaction, saying he saw her face and that she “just looked like she wanted to weep and smile and cry at the same time.”
After she began feeling unwell shortly afterward, Lopez went to Cedars-Sinai, where doctors found dangerously high blood pressure and stabilized her, according to AP. The medical team performed blood work and ordered an ultrasound and an MRI. AP reported that the scans found her uterus was empty but that a nearly full-term fetus in an amniotic sac was instead hidden in her abdomen near her liver.
Ozimek told AP that it did not appear the fetus was directly invading organs. He said it looked “mostly implanted on the sidewall of the pelvis,” noting that the location could be dangerous but more manageable than implantation in the liver.
Outside specialists said abdominal ectopic pregnancies tend to progress without removal. Dr. Cara Heuser, a maternal-fetal specialist in Utah not involved in the case, said almost all pregnancies implanted outside the uterus rupture and hemorrhage if not removed, and that they most commonly occur in the fallopian tubes.
The AP report also pointed to prior medical literature describing rare instances of survival in abdominal pregnancies. It said a 2023 medical journal article by doctors in Ethiopia described an abdominal pregnancy in which both mother and baby survived, while noting that fetal mortality can be as high as 90% and that birth defects were seen in about 1 in 5 surviving babies.
On Aug. 18, AP reported that a medical team delivered an 8-pound (3.6-kilogram) baby while Lopez was under full anesthesia and removed the cyst during the same surgery. Ozimek said Lopez lost nearly all of her blood, but the team controlled bleeding and gave transfusions.
During the operation, doctors continually updated Andrew Lopez about what was happening, AP said. He described the experience in emotional terms, telling AP: “The whole time, I might have seemed calm on the outside, but I was doing nothing but praying on the inside.” He said he was scared half to death, knowing “at any point I could lose my wife or my child.”
Lopez and her son recovered well, AP reported, and Ozimek said: “It was really, really remarkable.” Ryu, named after a baseball player and a Street Fighter character, has since been healthy and thriving, AP said. His parents also described watching him interact with his 18-year-old sister, Kaila.
With Ryu’s first Christmas approaching, Lopez told AP that she sees the outcome as providential. She said, “I do believe in miracles,” and added that “God gave us this gift — the best gift ever.”