MIRACLE BABY BORN TWICE

Removed from womb for surgery and returned

In a few years, when people ask LynLee Boemer, “what’s your birthday?” she can reply: “Do you mean the first one?”

The little Texas girl was removed from her mother’s womb to have a massive tumour on her tailbone removed in March. She was then returned to the uterus and born again — this time permanently — by caesarean section, on June 6.

LynLee had a sacrococcygeal teratoma, which affects one in every 35,000 fetuses — making it relatively common, if still rare, said Dr. Darrell Cass, the Texas Children’s Hospital doctor who performed the surgery.

“Some of these tumours can be very well-tolerated, so the fetus has it and can get born with it and we can take it out after the baby’s born,” Cass said, according to CNN.

But in LynLee’s case, the tumour was massive — nearly as large as the then-23week-old fetus. So large, in fact, that the plan to perform the surgery while baby was still inside the womb didn’t work.

Instead, after several hours of surgery, she was “hanging out in the air … Essentially, the fetus is outside, like completely out, all the amniotic fluid falls out, it’s actually fairly dramatic,” Cass said.

“The part on the fetus we do very, very quickly,” Cass said, according to CNN. “It’s only 20 minutes or so on the actual fetus.” Most of the time is spent carefully incising the uterus, which he called “a big muscle lined with membranes.”

During the surgery, with the umbilical cord carefully kept intact, the fetus’s heart virtually stopped, but a second doctor managed to keep it pumping long enough for the baby to be returned to the womb, which was then stitched back up.

“LynLee didn’t have much of a chance,” her mother, Margaret Boemer, said in an interview released by the hospital.

“The tumour was shutting her heart down and causing her to go into cardiac failure, so it was a choice of allowing the tumour to take over her body or giving her a chance at life,” she said.

“After the open fetal surgery, her heart had time to heal while I was still pregnant with her, so she has no heart issues now, and is doing amazing,” Boemer told Fox News.

The tumour did start growing again, so further surgery was done eight days after LynLee’s birth — the second one.

IT WAS A CHOICE OF ALLOWING THE TUMOUR TO TAKE OVER ... OR GIVING HER A CHANCE.