“It was a miracle,” Darrell Cass, co-director of the Texas Children’s Fetal Center, one of the most respected pregnancy centers in the United States, said in 2021. What fact did Dr. Cass define like this? That of Lynlee, the baby who was born twice so as not to die.
Margaret Boemer received the first blow in 2016. The woman, who lives in Texas, was four months pregnant. They were twins, but one of them had not been able to survive. It was her third pregnancy (she had two girls) and the bad news didn’t stop there.
The second blow: the twin that was saved and carried in her womb had a sacrococcygeal teratoma, a tumor that develops in one in every 35,000 fetuses, especially in girls. It develops before birth and grows in the tailbone.
The bad third was missing. Some of these tumors can be tolerated, but in the case of Margaret’s daughter the disease was fatal. The tumor was sucking Lynlee’s blood, causing her to be unable to grow. The doctors gave Margaret a solution: abort. She looked for other answers.
Dr. Cass told Margaret: “It’s like a fight between two people who want to grow. The tumor always wins and the baby ends up dying because its heart can’t take the fight. It only has one chance.” The Texas Children’s Fetal Center offered to do fetal surgery. Almost impossible, but it was giving the last chance to that girl who wanted to reach the world.
This is how her mother explains it: “Lynlee didn’t have much of a chance. At 23 weeks, the tumor was closing her heart, causing her to go into heart failure, so the choice was between allowing the tumor to take over her body or giving her a chance to live. For us it was an easy decision.”
When the baby was six months pregnant, the doctors began her operation. The baby left the placenta for twenty minutes. She had come into the world. Only for 1,200 seconds, the time necessary to remove the tumor that already measured the same size as her.
Cass and his team operated on her for about five hours: “The part on the fetus is very very quick. It takes 20 minutes. The part that takes the longest is opening the uterus. The tumor was so large that a large incision was needed. “The baby was completely out of her mother’s womb for twenty minutes, all the amniotic fluid must have fallen out, it was actually quite dramatic.”
During surgery, Lynlee’s heart slowed down. And Cass explains the anguish that overwhelmed him: “She basically stopped. A key member of the team, a heart specialist, gave the appropriate medication and allowed us to continue operating.”
To finish the operation, surgeons placed Lynlee inside the womb and sewed up her mother’s uterus. The baby returned to her mother’s belly. She would be there for another three months, until on June 6, 2016, she was born for the second time, this time by cesarean section. And she heals.
If before Margaret only received bad news, now it was all good. Seven days after birth, the baby underwent surgery again to remove the remains of the tumor that she still had. The result was totally successful and the girl is now 8 years old.
