A Los Angeles woman recently celebrated her first Christmas with her young son, Ryu, who was born under truly extraordinary circumstances.
Ryu developed outside his mother’s womb, hidden for months behind an ovarian cyst that reached the size of a basketball. The case was so astonishing that the team of surgeons and OB-GYNs who treated him documented it for a case study in a medical journal.
The way Ryu was conceived is a “far, far less than 1 in a million” situation, explained Dr. John Ozimek, medical director of childbirth at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, where Ryu was born. “This is really amazing.”
Suze Lopez, now 41, always had irregular cycles, so it was not strange that she did not have menstrual periods, even for several consecutive months. Almost 20 years ago, she was diagnosed with two ovarian cysts, one of which was removed immediately, and the other not.
So in early 2025, when Lopez noticed her abdomen swelling, her first thought was the cyst. He never felt kicks or had morning sickness, and sure enough, his instinct was at least partially correct.
The pressure and pain in her abdomen increased as the days passed, and she was convinced that, even if this affected her ability to conceive again, it was time to remove the other cyst, which without her knowledge had grown to weigh an impressive 10 kilos.
She needed a CT scan to prepare for surgery, which required a radiation pregnancy test, and to her complete surprise, the result was positive. Lopez was delighted, but the pain and discomfort increased and she soon had to be hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai, where her medical team found an almost fully developed fetus in an amniotic sac lodged against her pelvis.
The technical term for where the fetus develops is “implantation,” and the term for a fetus that implants outside the uterus is “ectopic pregnancy.” Almost all of these cases end in rupture and bleeding. As such, fetal mortality can be as high as 90% in these cases and birth defects occur in about 1 in 5 babies who survive, SF Gate reports.
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However, because the Ryu fetus was implanted against the pelvic wall and not the liver, it was much more manageable, which is why Lopez didn’t have more pain before.
Lopez and her son beat the odds, despite a massive surgical procedure that delivered Ryu weighing 8 pounds and removed the ovarian cyst, together weighing as much as an adult bobcat. During the procedure, Lopez lost half of her blood, and had to receive continuous transfusions.
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“The whole time, he might have seemed calm on the outside, but on the inside he was doing nothing but praying,” Andrew Lopez, Suze’s husband, told SF Gate. “It was something that scared me to death, knowing that at any moment I could lose my wife or my son.”
Instead, both survived without adverse effects. Ryu “completes” his family, his mother said, and recently celebrated his first Christmas with his older sister, Kaila.
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