Suze Lopez kept getting the question you’re never supposed to ask a woman: Are you pregnant?
It was perhaps understandable, in her case, because she was carrying a 22-pound ovarian cyst that had swollen her abdomen. Rather than take offense, the Bakersfield nurse gently explained that, no, she was not expecting.
But she was mistaken.
News emerged this week that Lopez gave birth in August to a healthy, 8-pound baby boy in an extraordinarily rare ectopic birth that Lopez calls miraculous.
“I feel bad I lied to all those people” asking if she was pregnant, Lopez told The Californian, half-joking. She said she never felt any morning sickness or unusual cravings and was used to having irregular periods.
“He was hiding behind the cyst. I didn’t feel him kicking because, if he did kick, it was against the cyst.”
She can hardly be blamed under the circumstances, said Dr. John Ozimek, medical director of labor and delivery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where Lopez gave birth on Aug. 18.
He said in a news release this week that her extreme ectopic pregnancy, with the fetus forming well outside the uterus near Lopez’s liver, “is pretty much unprecedented.”
“It was the baby growing in her abdomen behind the mass that was pushing everything out. So, that’s the reason she didn’t know she was pregnant,” Ozimek said.
The dermoid cyst on her left ovary was not sudden but had grown gradually over many years. She’d had another removed from her right ovary years ago but opted to leave the left one in place in order to stave off what’s called surgical menopause, when an end to hormone production leads to hot flashes and other unpleasant effects.
That’s another reason her son came as a surprise: Lopez, now age 42, had avoided going to a doctor because she expected to be told it was time to remove her ovary, and she wasn’t ready for that.
But this summer, with discomfort in her abdomen worsening, she felt like she had little choice, and that’s when she learned of her pregnancy.
A routine, pre-surgery pregnancy test came out positive, though she doubted the result, thinking it may have been because of ovarian cancer. But diagnostic imaging confirmed she was pregnant.
Lopez broke the news to her husband, Andrew, three days before the surgical delivery, at Dodger Stadium during a game against the San Diego Padres. She presented him with a onesie Dodgers uniform, but Andrew could hardly believe it.
“He was in shock,” she said. “I (told him), ‘Nope, not kidding.’”
After the delivery, the happy father offered to delay his coursework in the registered nursing program at Bakersfield College. But she insisted he continue — the right decision in retrospect, she said — and just this week he graduated from the program.
Ironically, she and Andrew had tried unsuccessfully for years to conceive a second child. Their first, a daughter named Kaila, turned 18 years old this year. Now she helps her mom take care of little brother.
Not knowing she was pregnant presented risks Lopez had no idea about. During a trip earlier this year to Japan, she rode on a roller coaster that jostled her around upside-down. She also got into a Japanese hot spring where the temperature reached at least 100 degrees. Neither experience is advised for pregnant women.
Hence her baby’s name, Ryu Jesse Lopez. His first name, she said, comes from a character in the popular video game Street Fighter, because her son is clearly a fighter.
His middle name, meaning “gift of God”, is a nod to what she and her husband deem divine intervention.
How else to explain the fact that, at 41 weeks, he was born with an amniotic sack that contained no fluid?
“His was dry as a bone, so we don’t know how his lungs developed,” Lopez said. “Because you have to have that fluid to develop his lungs. … He’s our God’s miracle.”
“It’s not water to wine or anything. God’s real in our life, to us,” she added.
The delivery presented special challenges to the hospital’s medical staff, Dr. Michael Manuel, a gynecological oncologist at Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center, said in this week’s news release.
“We had to figure out how to deliver the baby with a placenta and its blood vessels attached in the abdomen, remove the very large ovarian mass and do everything we could to save mom and this child,” Manuel said.
Thirty medical experts took part in the surgical delivery, among them maternal-fetal medicine specialists and gynecological oncologists. After the intense procedure, Lopez started bleeding badly, requiring 11 units of blood, reported Cedars-Sinai, California’s only level IV maternal care hospital.
While mother continues to recover during extra time off work, Ryu is doing fine. He was taken off a breathing tube within a day after birth, and his sole complication is that he requires physical therapy to straighten a toe that had been pushed up against the cyst.
Dr. Sara Dayanim, a neonatologist at Cedars-Sinai Guerin Children’s, said in Wednesday’s news release that during his first two weeks, Ryu reached “all the important benchmarks for surviving well.”
“He defied all the odds,” she said.