In a rare surgery, a team of doctors from an Indian hospital removed the skeleton of an unborn baby from the womb of a 60-year-old woman after a span of 36 years.

The woman, Kantabai Gunvant Thakre from Pipariya (Seoni) in Madhya Pradesh was operated upon recently by a team of doctors at a hospital last week.

She had been complaining of consistent pain in her abdomen for the last two months. On check-up, the doctors felt a lump on the lower right side of her abdomen, and feared it was cancer.

The presence of a lump was confirmed by sonography. Further, a CT scan revealed that the lump was made of hard, calcified matter.

“It was after the patient underwent a MRI that the doctors could make out that the mass was in fact a child’s skeleton,” The Tmes Of India reports.

The Times Of India reports that the woman who got pregnant in 1978 as a 24-year-old, had then suffered from a medical condition in which the baby was growing outside the uterus. However, the pregnancy got terminated mid-way.

“We asked for a detailed medical history and the patient’s brother told us that in 1978 she was pregnant and had some complications,” said Dr B S Gedam, who led the team of surgeons.

Earlier, doctors from a city-based hospital had told her that her foetus might have died at that time and she would have to undergo an operation. But the Thakre got scared at the prospect of surgery and went away to her village (Pipariya) without undergoing the operation, Gedam said.

He said that the patient claimed that after a few months of treatment at a health centre in her village, she was relieved.