A Canadian doctor thought he’d seen it all, but then he found a baby growing in a patient’s liver.
Dr. Michael Narvey, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba in Canada, posted the ultrasound and details to his TikTok account, @nicu_musings. The post has been viewed more than 3 million times, has nearly 350,000 likes and almost 20,000 comments.
It had been 49 days since the woman’s last menstrual cycle, but she’d been bleeding for 14 days. An ultrasound found the baby.
“She had an ectopic pregnancy in her liver,” Narvey said in the TikTok video. “We see these sometimes in the abdomen, but never in the liver. This is a first for me.”
An ectopic pregnancy occurs when a fertilized egg implants and grows outside the main cavity of the uterus.
An ectopic pregnancy most often occurs in a fallopian tube, which carries eggs from the ovaries to the uterus. This type of ectopic pregnancy is called a tubal pregnancy. Sometimes, an ectopic pregnancy occurs in other areas of the body, such as an ovary, the abdominal cavity or the lower part of the uterus (cervix), which connects to the vagina.
An ectopic pregnancy isn’t viable because the fertilized egg can’t survive, the Mayo Clinic states on it website. They can be dangerous, however, because the growing tissue could cause life-threatening bleeding.
After his followers asked, Narvey posted an explanation of how the fertilized egg manage to implant in the liver.
Narvey explained when a sperm fertilizes an egg in the fallopian tube, it usually travels through the tube to the uterus. Sometimes, however, the fertilized egg gets stuck in the tube. This is the most common form of ectopic pregnancy.
Less common is the fertilized egg flowing back toward the ovary, where it attaches to the ovary; the peritoneum, which is the tissue that lines your abdominal wall and covers most of the organs in your abdomen; or the liver.
According to the National Centre for Biotechnology Information, there were only 14 cases of ectopic pregnancies in the liver from 1954 through 1999.
Surgeons were able to save the woman’s life, but not that of the fetus. The sac in the liver had already ruptured, the Sun reported.
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