Ok, so in lecture a couple weeks ago my professor was talking about the feedback system in relation to blood pressure. He told us that the only non-fatal case of positive feedback was in childbirth, and then launched into a story to demonstrate. He said that when the baby dies inside the womb and doesn’t come out, and the mother lives through it, that the womb develops a calcium shell-like layer around the baby to prevent bacteria and decomposition. He said that the mother will continue to look pregant until the fetus is removed surgically.
So, based on this, here are my questions:
After the baby dies, if no one removes the fetus from the calcium shell, is it possible for the mother to concieve again in that state?
If so, how would the living fetus develop alongside the dead encased fetus?
Would the mother look to be carrying twins?
Is there any recorded cases of this?
I appreciate any light shown on this! I of course asked my professor, he replied with “What a pleasant question while I am enjoying my Thanksgiving vacation! No, I’ve never heard of a double pregnancy of the type you have described, but it would probably be possible?”
*And of course I spelled pregnancy wrong in the title! Mods, fix please?
I am a surviving twin of a double pregnancy. Apparently my fetal twin died very early and so was partly reabsorbed, but after my birth, the physician told my mother and dad that there had been a double-placenta afterbirth delivered.
And to make it even more weird, I’m a Gemini who’s a musician AND an engineer. Oooooooh.
I dispute that “weird” characterization. I’m a “Gemini”, who’s also a half-assed “musician”, and was employed for over a decade as an “engineer”. Where do you get this “weird” characterization? Cite, please…
Gosh, Cheshire Human! I was just pulling your leg a little…and it came off in my hand!
I concede that many other people have both artistic-and-creative and logical-and-practical aspects to their personalities at the same time. (Let’s see, Les Paul springs to mind…) Just that the typical characterizations of musicians and engineers (call me nuts, but check out their sock drawers and you’ll see what I mean) are fairly distinct.
Anyway, I’ve always felt just a teentsy bit of guilt–not that this is rational, of course. Did I elbow out my unborn twin, so to speak? Did I absorb his or her pre-natal tendencies? Is that why people are always saying “Gosh, Aunt Pam, you are really a Renaissance Woman!” Is that why I have days when I’m fed up with creative types with no concept of how to get from A to B, and other days when I could cheerfully strangle those who can’t imagine that we could get from A to B by using a Non-Standard Method? The Magic 8 Ball isn’t answering and I have to go practice my chord progressions-----and troubleshoot the recording studio again.
I saw a TLC special (an Afghani woman) and since then I’ve read a bit about some different cases. Since lithopedions are caused by the fetus developing and dying in the abdominal cavity (a form of ectopic pregnancy), not the womb, many women go on to have other pregnancies and children while still carrying their ‘stone baby’.
I think your prof misled you, the uterus doesn’t ever house a lithopedion as far as I know. When a mother can’t deliver a fetus/baby from the womb and it dies, her body usually continues laboring and whoever is assisting the birth has to get inside her to cut the fetus/infant in pieces small enough to deliver. Otherwise it’s pretty certain the mother will die from sepsis I think.
Considering he is old enough to have witnessed the dawn of time, I have no problems believing he mixed up some of the facts. He likes to interrupt his own lectures with extra tidbits and side stories which always appear on the exam, and this was one of them. He spent all of about two minutes on before moving on, so he didn’t really give us a lot of information about it. The questions I asked in the OP were mine alone, nothing he covered in lecture, just something I was curious about and wasn’t sure how to google. I sent him an email with the link to the wiki article, he simply replied, “Interesting.”
I have no idea how many of my classmates were Gemini, but out of a graduating class of 79 brand-new Chemical Engineer, 12 had six or more years’ worth of official musical education (“conservatorio”); at least three of them had intermediate degrees in multiple instruments (each of these requires four “grades”, and you can’t start an instrument until you’ve passed the previous two years of basic, or add another instrument until you’ve passed at least one year of the previous instrument).
My primary and high school classmate with the superior degree in guitar is an architect. The conductor of the town’s band (superior degrees in three instruments, then the degree in conducting) is a technical engineer. The BFF of my BFF’s brother has a superior degree in piano and is a mining engineer. One of my grad school classmates (ok, so this one was a Chemist) had gotten his double degree thanks to a full scholarship in Music and was paying for grad school through his music gigs.
