During pregnancy, sometimes, not everything goes as well as we had imagined. To this mother we talked about today, pregnant with twins, things were twisted and after a miserable news, that one of the fetuses had not survived, another arrived. The second of her babies suffered a rare tumor that also put her life at risk.
It was a sacrococcygeal teratoma, a tumor that develops before birth and grows in the coccyx of the fetus. Occasionally, that tumor grows controlled and can be expected at birth to remove it. But, as it increases in size thanks to the baby's blood fluid, they sometimes "compete" and win the tumor, which grows and grows, causing fetal death.
While its frequency is low, sacrococcygeal teratoma represents the most frequent tumor lesion during pregnancy: approximately occurs in one of every 35,000 pregnancies. The perinatal mortality of this tumor that is diagnosed prenatally is 25-37%, often due to heart failure (because they are fast-growing, solid and highly vascularized teratomas). In many cases, depending on the characteristics of the pregnant woman and the fetus, pregnancy termination or postnatal surgery is used.
Fortunately, fetoscopy or surgery to the fetus while still in the womb has advanced greatly in recent years and can also be used occasionally to treat teratoma. And although it was not the simplest option, it was the one chosen by her mother, Margaret Boemer, of Texas (United States) for her baby, when some doctors had suggested the possibility of terminating the pregnancy.
At 23 weeks gestation, seven weeks after having detected the problem and having lost one of his babies in the first trimester, the tumor was closing the heart of the fetus that was still alive, which led him to heart failure . The tumor was almost as large as the baby and the Texas Children's Fetal Center specialists saw the operation viable.
During the delicate intervention, the heart stopped and they reactivated it thanks to the intervention of the cardiologist the appropriate medication. Therefore, it is not surprising that the mother says that her baby has been born twice. The process was long, almost five hours, mainly due to the incision and suture of the uterus, a thorough operation. The removal of the tumor itself was a matter of 20 minutes, with the legs and torso of the fetus outside the mother's womb. And the intervention ended successfully.
The baby was born again at 36 weeks of pregnancy and after eight days of her birth the operation was completed to remove the remains of the tumor. Both she and the mother are fine and of course, the happy mother three the decision that saved her daughter's life, whose name is Lynlee.
So you can say that the girl is another "miracle baby", a little girl who was born twice and that he struggled to get ahead thanks to the medical intervention, to the joy of his whole family and hope of other pregnancies that have this problem.
