Original in Spanish: Autocirugía
2021-01-01
I was looking for info on that guy who operated on his own appendicitis and stumbled on a woman who biopsied herself and removed a tumour from her own breast. Both were doctors and both had equipment.
I already knew the story of that titan who performed a caesarean on herself, but another name shows up as “related news” that rings no bell. So I dig.
Turns out there are at least two women who have taken their baby out of themselves all on their own:
Inés Ramírez Pérez, an indigenous Mexican woman, at age 40 and with her eighth child. Giving birth on her own she knew by heart, but it wasn’t the first time things went wrong. Three years earlier she had delivered a stillborn girl and she was terrified of going through the same thing again. It was midnight, she had been in labour since morning, her husband was still drinking at the cantina. She sat down, took a few swigs of medicine-cabinet alcohol because it was what she had at hand to gather enough courage. She grabbed a kitchen knife and kept cutting into herself until, an hour later, she could take the boy out. Then she lost consciousness. When she woke up again she asked her other son Benito, age 6, to go get help. The baby survived and they named him “Orlando Ruiz Ramírez”. Since all this happened in 2000 the kid must be all grown up by now, but I can’t tell which of the umpteen ones showing up on the internet he might be (if any). The woman said: “I couldn’t stand the pain any more, and if my baby was going to die, then I decided I would have to die too; but if he was going to grow up, I would see him grow and be with my son.”
Zenaida Arroyave, an indigenous Colombian woman, fifth child. She was with her husband, about whom I’ve found some reference that she had reported him for abuse between drinking bouts, though it’s not clear to me whether she reported him to the police, the community, or what. She did the caesarean on herself alone with a razor blade. She said: “I called my husband and asked him to bring me a knife and to cut me himself and he ignored me, he said how could he damage another person’s body (…) three times I scratched myself (the belly) and the baby came out”. In 2018, the following year, her husband killed her with a shotgun in front of two of her children and then killed himself. The police took 5 days to arrive after the murder.
I’m left thinking this proves you can be very brave and a battered woman at the same time. I’m aware two cases are nothing but anecdote, but it keeps spinning around my head.
Until I talk about it with E., and she tells me maybe that’s exactly why. That being abused makes them put anyone else before their own survival and wellbeing. Maybe one thing really is related to the other.
Now I don’t know what to think. I imagine there must be evidence in some direction about the effects of abuse on self-preservation, but that’s much harder for me to research.
Maybe you can lend me a hand.
2026-03-10
I already knew the story of the guy who removed his own appendix, and of the women who performed caesareans on themselves. I told it around here a while ago.
Today I learned that this lady was at the South Pole in ‘98, during the polar night, when she found an ugly little lump in her breast.
She took her own biopsy samples, used a pleistocene microscope to take photos and send them off to get her diagnosis: breast cancer.
They couldn’t extract her from there safely.
So they airdropped whatever she needed for chemo, even in bad weather because the woman was in a bad way. She treated herself and it went into remission.
It’s sad that she ended up dying 10 years later of brain metastasis, but nobody can take the epic away from her.
Related: Inés Ramírez, Zenaida Arroyave, Leonid Rógozov, Jerri Nielsen
(Facebook, 2021-01-01 / 2026-03-10)