The baby who was born twice
Girl is taken OUT of mother for life-saving op, then put back in womb for birth 12 weeks later
WHEN she grows up, LynLee Boemer should demand to celebrate two birthdays a year.
For she is the baby who was born twice. Her proper entry into the world came 12 weeks after she was temporarily taken out of her mother’s womb for a life-saving operation.
When her mother Margaret, 37, went for a routine ultrasound 16 weeks into pregnancy, doctors discovered a tumour on LynLee’s coccyx.
While surgery can sometimes be delayed until after birth, the growth on the base of LynLee’s spine was threatening the flow of blood to her heart. Surgery was her only hope so, in an operation lasting five hours, doctors cut open Mrs Boemer’s womb and took the 1lb 3oz foetus out for 20 minutes.
They removed the tumour – which was almost as big as LynLee – and then returned her to the womb.
It meant her mother could carry to near full term before LynLee was born for the second time by C-section, weighing 5lb 5oz. Although she needed further surgery eight days later to remove the remaining bits of the tumour, LynLee is now nearly five months old and healthy.
Mrs Boemer and her husband Jeff, from Plano, Texas, who already had two daughters, said they feared the worst when they were told the results of the ultrasound. ‘They saw something on the scan, and the doctor came in and told us that there was something seriously wrong,’ Mrs Boemer said. ‘It was very shocking and scary.’
As the tumour grew, LynLee’s health deteriorated. One option was to terminate the pregnancy but Mrs Boemer, who had originally been expecting twins, had already lost one foetus.
‘LynLee didn’t have much of a chance. The tumour was shutting her heart down so it was a choice of allowing the tumour to take over her body or giving her a chance at life,’ Mrs Boemer said. ‘It was an easy decision for us: We wanted to give her life.’
Dr Darrell Cass, who performed the operation with his team at Texas Children’s Fetal Centre, said that LynLee’s tumour – known as a sacrococcygeal teratoma – was the most common type seen in a newborn but still ‘pretty rare’. While in some cases surgery can be delayed until after the birth, LynLee’s tumour grew too fast and her chances of survival were slim.
Most of the surgeons’ time was taken cutting into Mrs Boemer’s womb, then making it as watertight as possible afterwards.
‘It’s kind of a miracle you’re able to open the uterus like that and seal it all back and the whole thing works,’ said Dr Cass.
Mrs Boemer said of LynLee’s eventual arrival: ‘It was her second birth. I was willing to endure all those risks to give her a chance at life.’