Suze Lopez was scheduled for surgery to remove an ovarian cyst that had been growing for years. Days before, a routine test came back positive: she was pregnant, after 17 years of trying to have a second child with her husband Andrew.
They celebrated at a Dodgers game in Los Angeles. That is where the pain began. At Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, they discovered something Dr. John Ozimek described as almost unheard of: the baby, whom they would name Ryu, had formed completely outside the uterus, next to the liver and beneath the spleen, in an abdominal ectopic pregnancy.
Thirty specialists operated simultaneously on the 22-pound cyst and performed the delivery. Suze lost nearly all her blood. Ryu was born healthy at 8 pounds and is still growing up in Bakersfield, California today.
