Chicago Gaffney Medical Center suffered through a surprisingly tricky Halloween during “Bad Habits,” with difficult patients, costume-clad waiting room attendants, and medical emergencies that are anything but easy to treat. One of the most baffling patients is Mary Katherine Trembley — otherwise known as MK (Ellen Adair), a nun who tells emergency department doctor Mitch Ripley (Luke Mitchell) that she’s experiencing abdominal pain. At first, Ripley thinks she’s just having a bout of diverticulitis due to her weakness for Halloween candy. But an ultrasound administered by Ripley reveals something shocking — the face of a baby on the ultrasound.
Ripley calls in obstetrician Hannah Asher (Jessy Schram) — who left and returned to the series – to double-check his impression. She agrees that it looks like a baby. She questions MK, and she reveals that she miscarried decades ago. It turns out that her discomfort stems from a lithopedion or ‘stone baby’ – a fetus calcified within the womb due to an immune response and left to lie for decades after its death. In MK’s case, hormonal changes brought on by perimenopause caused conditions within her body to change.
Can something like this happen in real life? It can and it has — just look at the examples left behind by various “stone babies” throughout the years.
‘Stone babies’ can happen in real life
There have been multiple instances of real-life “stone babies” delivered throughout the years. Among a number of other examples, in 2009, a 92-year-old woman in China delivered a 60-year-old fetus she had carried for decades. A Chilean woman had surgery to remove a fetus she’d carried for 60 years in 2015. In 2013, a Colombian woman learned she was carrying a fetus that had lingered within her body for 40 years — because she was 82 years old, they decided against operating on her.
A lack of obstetric care can often lead to stone babies developing. And they can be dangerous. Dr. Natalie Burger, then an endocrinologist and fertility specialist at Texas Fertility Center, told NBC News in 2009 that a whole host of complications can be spawned from stone babies, including fertility issues, intestinal obstructions, and pelvic abscesses. Since they can grow to be as large and heavy as a living, full-term child, they can be quite bothersome. But they can be asymptomatic as well — just as they are for MK on “Chicago Med.” It goes to show how deep the show’s research can be, even if it’s sometimes medically inaccurate — and how important obstetric care is.
