Can Babies Develop Outside the Uterus IRL (as Seen on Grey’s Anatomy)?
Can a baby really come to term outside the uterus? Yes, as Grey's medical consultant Meg Marinis attests. Lebo had an ectopic pregnancy, which occurs when the movement of the egg along the fallopian tube is disrupted for some reason and the egg begins to develop in the ovary, cervix, or stomach area. Abdominal pregnancies such as Lebo's can be hard to diagnose without an MRI, and the baby rarely survives to term. If the pregnancy should rupture, like Lebo's did, the mother could suffer from severe bleeding and hemorrhagic shock, and surgery is necessitated.
Now, what about the man with the tree growing inside his lung? That's based on a true story: a 28-year-old Russian man had a two-inch fir tree surgically removed from his lung. There has since been a flurry of academic skepticism about how such a tree could grow without soil and sunlight, but others argue that a tree at that size could not be inhaled into the lung. In any case, it's pretty freaky. And it's almost too bad "I Am a Tree" was already the name of a Grey's episode.