How do you explain this?

 

 Doctors at Gwarzo General Hospital in Kano are struggling to come to terms with the successful birth of a baby girl on Wednesday last week, under circumstances they said medical textbooks have labelled “rare and unusual”.

The strange happening occurred after the baby’s mother, who had never gone for antenatal, first visited the hospital located about 30 minutes drive from Kano city last but one Monday.
“She noticed progressive swelling of the area, which she said was Daji (cancer),” the Chief Medical Director of the hospital, Dr. Charles Onyia, said. “She might have decided to come to the hospital after trying local medication without success,” he hypothesized.


But the doctor who attended to the woman was sure it was not cancer, but something strange, and he did not waste time to ask her to go for a scan.

“When I touched the abdomen, I felt the foetal pad occurring outside her uterus,” Dr. Suleman Abdul said.
As the ultrasound results came, the picture was vivid: the woman, simply called Aisha, was nine months pregnant, carrying live and kicking baby “on the top of her stomach and intestine, not in the womb”.

For the doctors and other medical staff in the hospital, the discovery was not just startling, it was also novel. They didn’t waste time to wheel her into the theater room and within 30 minutes, the baby had been delivered alive.

“When I was a medical student 20 years ago, Professor Orhue of University of Benin Teaching Hospital said this cannot happen,” recalled Dr. Charles.

“In the professor’s words: ‘It is impossible to have abdominal pregnancies to last to term (that is nine months) [and] even if they do, the baby will not be alive’.”

During the operation, according to Dr. Onyia, more astonishing discoveries were made. “Surprisingly, we found out that membrane was well circumscribed or defined outside the womb, and secondly, the placenta was found on the intestine and stomach,” he said.

“I am proud to tell you that all over the world, we have never seen or heard of this kind of surgery where the baby is brought out alive. It is very rare even in textbooks. They hardly progress or get to 9 months gestation. The baby and the mother are lost mostly during the surgery. She is a miracle,” the CMD added.

The hospital said the baby and the mother were healthy but will be kept 10days for observation.

For the nine months she was carrying the baby, Aisha, mother of five, said she had suffered persistent stomach ache. “Now the pains have completely stopped,” she said.

When contacted, a consultant gynecologist at the Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital (AKTH) in Kano, Dr. Hauwa Musa Abdullahi, confirmed that abdominal pregnancies are rare, but not impossible.

She recalled a case where a woman having the problem was operated and the baby was brought out alive. “It is not as if it does not happen; it happens but very rarely. Even last week we had a patient with abdominal pregnancy at AKTH, but the baby did not come out alive,” she said.
Dr. Hauwa said the condition is caused by a number of factors, including infections and others.