Woman’s story goes viral after baby found growing inside her liver

‘This is a first for me,’ the doctor on the case says

A TikTok post about a woman who found a baby growing in her liver has gone viral (TikTok / Dr Michael Narvey / Dr Karan Raj)

The rare case of a woman with a baby growing in her liver has gone viral after doctors shared details of the case on TikTok.

Pediatrician Michael Narvey at the Children’s Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba, Canada, explained: “I thought I had seen it all [until] a 33-year-old woman comes in with a 14-day history of menstrual bleeding and 49 days since her last menstrual period.

“What they find in the liver is this: a baby. She had an ectopic pregnancy in her liver.

“We see these sometimes in the abdomen but never in the liver. This is a first for me.”

The video about the medical case has had almost seven million views on the social media platform.

Dr Karan Raj, another medic on the platform who has 236million followers, also shared a case history.

He told of “one of the scariest CT scans I’ve ever seen — a 27-year-old woman with a healthy 2-week fetus in the right lobe of the liver”.

He said that so-called hepatic ectopic pregnancies are so rare that “there are only handful of cases documented in the literature”.

He added that the “liver is a highly vascular structure so any compressive force placed on it could result in massive internal bleeding”.

According to the Mayo Clinic, an ectopic pregnancy ensues “when a fertilized egg implants and grows outside the main cavity of the uterus”.

It most often occurs “in a fallopian tube, which carries eggs from the ovaries to the uterus”.

The Mayo Clinic also that such pregnancies can’t “proceed normally” and that “the fertilized egg can’t survive, and the growing tissue may cause life-threatening bleeding, if left untreated”.

An ectopic pregnancy can also take place in “the ovary, abdominal cavity, or the lower part of the uterus”.

Early signs that this kind of pregnancy may be occurring include “a missed period, breast tenderness, and nausea” the clinic states.

In a subsequent video, Dr Narvey noted that one viewer indicated that a baby survived a hepatic pregnancy in Africa in 2003.

“This baby was not actually in the liver, the baby was attached to the liver and the placenta was left inside as it was too difficult to remove it,” Dr Narvey added.