Andrew and Suze Lopez of Bakersfield welcomed their newborn son Ryu at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on Aug.18, 2025, against some of the highest medical odds that the couple’s doctors had ever seen.
Suze had an abdominal ectopic pregnancy, in which a fertilized egg develops outside the uterus in the abdomen. According to the team that treated her, the odds of a viable pregnancy developing so far away from Suze’s uterus, let alone with few complications for mother and child, are “far less than one in a million.”
The Lopezes are celebrating the extraordinarily unlikely healthy birth of their newest child thanks to the work of a massive team of specialists and, in part, a well-timed visit to L.A. for a Dodgers game.
“ I credit it all to God of course, because he gave us such a miracle,” Suze told LAist.
Discovering the pregnancy
Suze had long been living with an ovarian cyst that made pregnancy very unlikely, especially because she’d already had her other ovary and cyst removed.
At first, Suze didn’t want to have the growing cyst removed for two reasons. Removing it meant that she would have gone through unwanted hormonal changes due to early menopause, and she was holding onto a sliver of hope that her teenage daughter Kaila might not end up an only child.
“ My daughter was always like, ‘Hey, let's have a brother or sister,’” Suze said. “And I was like, ‘Sorry, just not happening.’ And I kind of just accepted it.”
Suze was finally starting to make plans to have the cyst removed, having “almost given up” on having a second child. At that point the cyst weighed 22 pounds. A routine pregnancy test ahead of a scheduled CT scan came back positive. But Suze, an emergency room nurse herself, knew false positives were possible due to a number of factors. Two more pregnancy tests came back positive. Follow up exams revealed a femur behind her cyst and blood flow in what appeared to be a developing fetus.
At that moment, Suze knew she had a viable pregnancy.
The Dodgers game
Suze broke the good news to Andrew at a Dodgers game. Andrew was just about to start his final semester as a nursing student, and the couple was there to celebrate. (Andrew said it was Aug. 15 — Demon Slayer hat night, for the record.) With Suze’s news, the couple had one more thing to commemorate.
But on that same trip, Suze started to feel abdominal pain — unbeknownst to her at the time, the baby she was carrying was already full term, mostly hidden behind the large cyst.
The couple quickly decided to go to Cedars-Sinai Hospital.
Cedars-Sinai earlier this year became the first hospital in California to be considered a Level IV Maternal Care hospital, the highest level of obstetric and maternal care given by the Joint Commission. And with a case this rare, specialists across several departments were needed to deliver the baby successfully.
The gravity of the situation
Dr. John Ozimek, Cedars-Sinai’s director of labor and delivery, was on call when Suze came into the hospital.
In addition to her abdominal pain, Suze had abnormally high blood pressure as an additional complicating factor. Knowing of Suze’s positive pregnancy test, Ozimek soon set out to get to the bottom of the issues.
“ Finally, I put the probe back way far away, somewhere where you would never see a baby,” said Ozimek. “And I started to see parts of a baby.”
Ozimek first noticed a femur, then the baby’s cranium. He measured the size — and only then did he realize how complicated the situation was about to become.
“I looked at her and I looked at her husband, Andrew, and I said, ‘Guys, you're full term. This is a full term pregnancy,’” he said.
In fact, Ozimek said that Ryu would’ve been well past the due date doctors would’ve given Suze if she had exhibited any symptoms of pregnancy.
Ozimek credited the Lopezes’ trusting attitude, and their knowledge of the medical profession, with helping the doctors conduct each test and procedure smoothly.
“ I am extremely grateful to her and to Andrew for putting their trust in us, not knowing who we were and essentially recommending this really risky and extreme surgery in less than 24 hours of meeting her,” Ozimek said.
With the extremely precarious surgery on the books, neonatal intensive care unit experts, anesthesiologists, and nurse practitioners, among others, then jumped into action.
The birth
Delivering a full-term abdominal ectopic pregnancy is exceedingly rare, and the team at Cedars-Sinai and the Lopezes had to think through all the contingencies before the operation.
“If we saw distress, we would do an emergency delivery and get the baby out,” Ozimek said. “Under most circumstances, that's OK. But in this circumstance, that would put her life in extreme danger.”
Because of the complexity of the procedure, doctors made the decision to put Suze under general anesthesia, which is generally not recommended. And so the work began.
First, Suze’s cyst was removed to allow doctors to access the baby. And even though Ozimek knew roughly what to expect beneath the cyst, he was still floored.
“ What we saw in there was just something you will never see in your life as a maternal fetal medicine specialist or as an obstetrician,” Ozimek said. “It's this eight pound baby — more than 8 pounds — laying directly in her abdomen. The head was up directly underneath the spleen. His little bottom was resting on top of her very tiny unpregnant uterus.”
Doctors quickly lifted Ryu out and began taking care of other tasks, like removing the placenta from Suze’s abdomen.
Suze started to hemorrhage blood during the intensive procedure, which Ozimek said the team had anticipated. Surgeons worked to control the bleeding, and anesthesiologists jumped in to give her blood transfusions to keep Suze stable. She lost 4.7 liters of blood all told, according to Ozimek, almost her whole blood volume.
Since Ryu was born without fluid in his amniotic sac, his lung development was a major concern. As the effects of the anesthesia wore off, Ryu proved to be a feisty, vocal baby. Doctors removed his breathing tube less than 24 hours after putting it in, and he continued to exhibit promising signs throughout the whole time he was in the ICU.
Against all odds, the delivery went off as planned without any major complications. Even Suze bounced back quickly from her procedure so she could focus on spending time with her surprise.
“ People use the word miracle and all the time for different things, and I don't — I mean, it's just who I am, I don't,” Ozimek said. “This is as close to it as I can imagine it, it really is. I think about it all the time.”
Post operation
The Lopezes named their baby Ryu for two reasons. The name pays tribute to former Dodgers pitcher Hyun-jin Ryu — a nod to where Andrew found out about the pregnancy — and also the Street Fighter character Ryu, a nod to the spirit and tenacity that his parents felt he had demonstrated.
“He fought through all these odds and it's just unbelievable,” Andrew said. “ We thought it was very fitting for him to have a fighter name and to also match where I found out we were gonna have this wonderful miracle.”
Ryu stayed in the care of neonatologists at Cedars-Sinai for about two weeks then recovered with Suze at the nearby Ronald McDonald House. After making the drive back and forth from Bakersfield in order to complete his last semester, Andrew celebrated his graduation from nursing school last week.
In the months since Ryu’s birth on Aug. 18, Suze, Andrew, Ryu and Kaila have been able to fall into a new rhythm as a family of four as they get ready to celebrate their first holidays together.
“ I think of life so differently,” Suze said. “I just appreciate everything — everything. Even if it's the baby crying, because that just means that his lungs work, they function, they can breathe.”
