After almost two decades of longing prayers, one family’s miracle arrived in the most unimaginable way — a baby boy, born from a pregnancy so rare it left even seasoned doctors in awe.
Ryu Lopez very stealthily gestated the entire 40 weeks of a full-term pregnancy without his mother ever knowing he existed.
This smiling baby boy with dark curly hair was born in August through an “abdominal ectopic pregnancy,” in which the fetus develops outside of his mother’s uterus.
If that sounds extremely rare, it is. According to the Cleveland Clinic, “stealth” or “cryptic” gestations account for 1 in every 2,500 pregnancies. In many cases, the baby does not survive to be born full term.
In Ryu’s case, a massive ovarian cyst blocked the fertilized egg from attaching to the uterus.
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Thus, Suze Lopez, his mother, didn’t know she was pregnant, which is something that she had prayed for with her husband, Andrew, since their daughter, Kaila, was born 17 years ago.
The family had known about the cyst for nearly two decades. Since then, Suze, an emergency room nurse in Bakersfield, California, monitored the slow-growing tumor with her health-care providers, intending to one day have it surgically removed.
So last summer, during a routine check of the cyst, the medical team found what appeared to be a fetus in a small space behind her abdomen. Several tests came back positive; an ultrasound showed blood flow, indicating a viable pregnancy.
“We were in L.A. for the Dodgers game, and she decided to tell me then,” Andrew said. “She gave me a little package with a onesie, and it just completely blew my mind. I said, ‘No, we’re in our 40s! Plus, I’m pretty sure you can’t get pregnant.’
“But she had this crying face with a smile. And I’m like, ‘Oh, you can’t fake that look. We’re having a baby.’ ”
He did not know their son’s birth was imminent.
Moments later, Suze Lopez felt a pain in her abdomen, so the couple went to nearby Cedars-Sinai Medical Center “to be on the safe side,” Andrew said.
At that time, he was a licensed vocational nurse completing his coursework to become a registered nurse, which he has since completed. The Lopez home now has two RNs.
At Cedars-Sinai, Suze was asked how many weeks pregnant she was, but she could only guess because up until a few days earlier, she was unaware of the baby developing behind her abdomen.
The nurses also asked whether she had received prenatal care or taken the appropriate vitamins. She repeatedly said “no.”
Because this was an abdominal ectopic pregnancy, she didn’t experience the typical bouts of morning sickness or severe cravings. Nor did she feel the baby’s kick, which surprises people.
“But he wasn’t in the right spot,” she said. “He wasn’t kicking me. He was kicking up against the cyst.”
Also, ectopic pregnancy does not present labor pains.
With a normal pregnancy, Suze explained, “you have a uterus which is contracting to push the baby out.”
“But,” she added, “since he wasn’t in the uterus, I would have never gone into labor.”
If Ryu had been discovered earlier, doctors would have suggested removing him, even if he wasn’t safely developed, “because it’s such a high risk to the mother for bleeding,” she said.
That danger, she added, could have surfaced if the child had been discovered much later. Thus, the moment she arrived at Cedars-Sinai was the best window to deliver the baby. But first, the team had to extract the cyst.
Cedars-Sinai is the only Level IV Maternal Care hospital in California. Andrew praised the staff for its impromptu assembling of 30 surgical professionals for the surgery.
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First, they lifted the cyst out of the way so that Ryu could be delivered and handed off to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.
They expected that Suze would bleed, and she did profusely, requiring more surgery and 11 units of blood. Still, the surgery was a success for mother and baby.
Suze left the hospital about 30 pounds lighter because she no longer carried the 8-pound baby and the 22-pound cyst.
“It’s amazing how everything clicked,” Andrew said. “But Cedars just happened to be in Hollywood, right over there. We just happened to be there too.”
For Ryu’s middle name, the couple chose “Jesse,” which in Hebrew means “gift of God.”
“It was timing,” Suze said. “For us to go to the Dodgers game, to be in L.A., and for all this to happen, it was God’s timing.”